The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My first encounter with McCarthy was Blood Meridian, which I read about two years ago for a fabulous class taught by Professor Bishop. It is one of the relatively few fictional works that have transcended the classroom and ended up on my bookshelf. Despite growing up in California, surrounding by the mythos of the Wild West, his take on the western landscape and man's violent drive toward the Pacific was intoxicating. I would say that I never understood the emotional forces, as divorced from the historical understanding of Manifest Destiny until I read Meridian.

With The Road, McCarthy further displays his ability to project the most basic human emotions against the most complicated moral and geographical backgrounds. He makes two wise choices, which allow his novel to accomplish the level of brilliance. The first is that he focuses the plot on two characters, narrowing the scope of an entire world down to the existence and relation of people who could be seen as opposites. These two characters are father and son, although they never receive those names from the author: they are the man, and the boy.

This is a device that I have enjoyed since I was very young. The first time it impressed me was in Nicolas Roeg's film Walkabout. I remember being stunned when the credits began to roll and I realized I had been moved to tears by nameless characters. Archetypes are generally considered the terrain of ancient and Classical era literature, but they are almost more powerful when placed in an era indoctrinated with the notion of individualism. It can serve to remind us that we are each a type of some kind, even if that type is only "father" or "son."

The second choice I find conducive to brilliance is the ambiguity of the past. The characters are wandering a wasteland. Indeed, the novel's synopsis refers to a post-apocalyptic landscape. Most approaches to apocalypse in popular culture these days are either strong socio-political statements about specific human faults, or a Dionysian reveling in such faults. Still others are funny. But they all give us explanations of not only what happened, but how it happened.

McCarthy doesn't stoop to this level. His interest is not what happened, but what continues to happen, and what connects the past to the present. Despite apocalypse, father-son love continues. It finds a form, even among trees covered with ash and a never-ending dust. His story is most moving not in its descriptions of decrepit automobiles, dilapidated homes, or abandoned gas stations. Nor in the protagonists' encounters with decaying corpses, blind drifters, or mutilated victims of some undefined band of "bad guys." It is in the perilous lives of the man and boy. These external elements only moved me when they threatened the continuation of the pair, either by separation or physical harm. Their love is impractical and desperately painful at times, but psychologically necessary, like so much of human emotion.

McCarthy doesn't skimp on the topographically descriptives, though. If I had stopped to find a dictionary every time he used a noun I had never heard before in order to set an outdoor scene, I would never have finished the damn thing. Although this could be frustrating to me at times, it was never repetitive and only served to enforce the authenticity of his world. As well as remind me to learn more tangible nouns, as opposed to these abstractions I'm well-versed in.

The Road is unrelenting. There are no chapter breaks, just larger spaces in between paragraphs. Like one might imagine a post-apocalyptic world, little is known and even less is stable, predictable, or happy. There are definite moments of sweetness, but they only tease you, glittering like embers threatening to go out at any moment. Despite knowing that fires always turn to embers and embers to ashes, I muscled through the psychological torment just so I could catch a few glimpses of light. Given the condition of his characters, I think McCarthy is trying to show the reader that this drive to find the smallest glints of happiness, despite the horror they reflect against, is what makes us human.

Give Me Liberty by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons

I've had a long time to sit on this book - my life got really busy in between reading it and having a chance to write about it. I'm very glad I had this time to reflect, because my initial impression of this "American Dream" was not very strong.

I felt that the characterization of the protagonist was too simple to be moving - she seemed like such a stereotype that it was difficult to think of her as anything other than a vehicle for some kind of message or symbolism. And if that was intentional, then any intended message or symbolism was unnecessarily muddled or disappointingly simplistic.

But then! I had time to think. I was expecting this novel to make political statements about the America that we live in, and when I found that the plot took the reader further and further from reality, I didn't understand the point. The protagonist doesn't fight for any large political ideals resembling revolution. She's very focused on her individual survival and is sporadically invested in the well-being of her family back in the ghetto. She's so beaten-down with trauma and hypocrisy that she thinks and speaks in short phrases connected by only a thread.

There is a strong and unflinching look into the upper workings of politics, evidenced by a popular president whose secret service has a compromised loyalty and spies on him while keeping him unavoidably supplied with alcohol during times of political crisis. The swaying of popular opinion and the ability to manipulate it is subtly handled in the public's acceptance of a tyrannical figure, and then his opposite, and then the tyrant again.

There are fun alternate history and science fiction aspects to this novel. A warring America with inner city troubles is exaggerated past the point of reality, and it's important to remember that this is, in fact, an alternate history and not a direct commentary on our own reality. I neglected to focus on this fact, and completely missed what I now believe to be the point of this novel.

In this twisted reality, our hero (have I mentioned her name yet? It's Martha Washington) acts in ways that rarely resemble a political hero's methods. She fights constantly, both in and out of the military's good graces. She's branded early on by a superior officer who wants to keep her a secret - this is the main conflict that makes us like her in her adult phase. As a child, she's overachieving and subject to horror, which makes her easily sympathetic. However, she grows into a more physically than intellectually reactive adult, and I couldn't help but feel as though her mental capacity took a backseat to combat scenes.

Martha acts in defense of a government that anyone in Bush-era America would outright condemn, but she's our hero. The point may be that every era, every regime, breeds its defenders and its heroes - that the definitions of honor and loyalty are dependent upon your historical or political position.

All this serious talk aside, this book is a fun read. There are physically-deformed children who are psychically connected to both people and machines. There's an Apache war chief who fuels a really interesting subplot about reparations. There are interspersed sections of magazine and newspaper articles that flesh out the alternate reality. It's a very well put-together book. Next time, I'll try to read it when I'm not in the hospital on pain medication. I'm sure that if you do so, you'll find this an intriguing story.