book review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
I am going to confess. I am a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction. I am a sucker for post-human books and TV shows like The World Without Us and Life After People and the like. I have always been interested in huge catastrophes, and as I grow I become more interested in the effect of those catastrophes on the people who survive them - and not the catastrophes we know, but on a greater scale. The kind where the World Ends As We Know It and no one is feeling fine.
I was going to do a focus on this last year, but got distracted by A Song of Ice and Fire, among other things, and didn't finish my shelf full of post-apocalpytic novels. I still had them, though, and I've been working my way slowly through them. Among others, this would include In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster, Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven andcetera, and The Forge of God by Greg Bear. Not, by far, complete reading. I still have Alas, Babylon and A Canticle for Leibowitz to get through, for example, and I might also throw books like Perdido Street Station and Iron Council in here, for various reasons.
There is also Life As We Knew It which if you ask me is not worth reading, let along paying money for. ppfft. Waste of time, that was. :|
So the problem I always have with the things I like is when people don't know the terminology I use. Or when I say 'fantasy' they ask what kind of fantasy and don't recognize the names - though this doesn't happen so much anymore. I am still immensely pleased when someone knows the authors I name, but that's a tangent. Post-apocalyptic fiction, though, in recent years, is easy. I can name one book, usually, and people get what I'm talking about. The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
It's gotten a crapton of recognition - he is a well known writer as is - and lots of notice, a movie already made (with Viggo Mortensen, no less!). I picked it up with some optimism and some skepticism.
I didn't like it as much as I wanted to.
Really, it had everything I like in it. It was bleak, dark, gloomy; presented a melancholy at best view of human nature and what people will do to survive. It didn't flinch from gruesome details (though the baby on the spit really made me flinch) and yet also showed people fighting through impossible circumstances to remain alive.
And yet I didn't like it very much.
In the beginning, what bothered me was the sentence structure. I'm realizing more and more that I'm very picky about my sentence length and structure. And Cormac McCarthy's short, choppy, commaless sentences did not work for me. It felt choppy, like hitting a wave on a small boat every time I got to a period. That made the first bit hard going, though it got better - and it's style, I got that. I got through A Clockwork Orange somehow.
I think what I don't like about it is twofold - first, that it feels self-indulgent to me. Second, it gave too much to be cryptic but too little to be satisfying.
Addressing the first: this was a book in which the darkness felt taken just a little bit too far. It was an orgy of awful and despair and tragedy and more awful, punctuated with bits of hope that just felt out of place rather than genuine. This kind of total blackness, combined with the style in which it was written, felt like a self-indulgent book to me - the book that might happen if I said, 'okay, I'm going to put my characters through six hells and a half and see what happens.' I need more than that to a book. I want my darkness to at least have some purpose, or at least be an expression of futility - the way it felt at the end of Perdido Stree Station - of escaping The Human Condition or whatever. And this wasn't, to me - it was just gloomy, and there was nothing behind the gloom. And so it became tedious to me, or ineffective. I expected to cry reading this book. I didn't. The fact that I cry at everything just makes my lack of emotion at the end of this book more striking to me.
Secondly, McCarthy left holes in all the wrong places. You learn some things, enough to fill in the holes, but not enough to keep you from stepping in the divets and falling on your face, so to speak. It was too much information for the mystery of what happened, the boy's mother, the world, the enemies to be compelling, to keep me curious the way a lack of names can - as in this, used well - but there was too little to satisfy me. I needed either more than was there or less than was there, and the uncomfortable teetering between them meant that I ended up just feeling like something, somewhere, was missing.
I would have liked to like it. As mentioned, it had the things I wanted to see, it had the ingredients. But somehow, the parts ended up being greater than the sum of the whole. It was the book where I was left staring at the last sentence, not thinking, like with A Brave New World, and not uncertain, like with The Iron Council, but just with dissatisfaction. I didn't know what to do with it, and ultimately, that goes for most of the book - I don't know what to do with it.
It was largely forgettable. I think the only thing I'll remember is the cannibalism. And that's a pity, because I think Cormac McCarthy is a good writer, perhaps - but this book missed the mark with me, by quite a distance.
That's all out of me. This has been stewing for a while. Am now reading The Atrocity Archives, definitely a drastic change in genre - and probably a much needed one. After that, I think I'll dive headlong into some urban fantasy again - Caitlin R. Kiernan - and see how that goes.
As always, anyone with dissenting thoughts is welcome to tell me what I have missed.
I was going to do a focus on this last year, but got distracted by A Song of Ice and Fire, among other things, and didn't finish my shelf full of post-apocalpytic novels. I still had them, though, and I've been working my way slowly through them. Among others, this would include In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster, Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven andcetera, and The Forge of God by Greg Bear. Not, by far, complete reading. I still have Alas, Babylon and A Canticle for Leibowitz to get through, for example, and I might also throw books like Perdido Street Station and Iron Council in here, for various reasons.
There is also Life As We Knew It which if you ask me is not worth reading, let along paying money for. ppfft. Waste of time, that was. :|
So the problem I always have with the things I like is when people don't know the terminology I use. Or when I say 'fantasy' they ask what kind of fantasy and don't recognize the names - though this doesn't happen so much anymore. I am still immensely pleased when someone knows the authors I name, but that's a tangent. Post-apocalyptic fiction, though, in recent years, is easy. I can name one book, usually, and people get what I'm talking about. The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
It's gotten a crapton of recognition - he is a well known writer as is - and lots of notice, a movie already made (with Viggo Mortensen, no less!). I picked it up with some optimism and some skepticism.
I didn't like it as much as I wanted to.
Really, it had everything I like in it. It was bleak, dark, gloomy; presented a melancholy at best view of human nature and what people will do to survive. It didn't flinch from gruesome details (though the baby on the spit really made me flinch) and yet also showed people fighting through impossible circumstances to remain alive.
And yet I didn't like it very much.
In the beginning, what bothered me was the sentence structure. I'm realizing more and more that I'm very picky about my sentence length and structure. And Cormac McCarthy's short, choppy, commaless sentences did not work for me. It felt choppy, like hitting a wave on a small boat every time I got to a period. That made the first bit hard going, though it got better - and it's style, I got that. I got through A Clockwork Orange somehow.
I think what I don't like about it is twofold - first, that it feels self-indulgent to me. Second, it gave too much to be cryptic but too little to be satisfying.
Addressing the first: this was a book in which the darkness felt taken just a little bit too far. It was an orgy of awful and despair and tragedy and more awful, punctuated with bits of hope that just felt out of place rather than genuine. This kind of total blackness, combined with the style in which it was written, felt like a self-indulgent book to me - the book that might happen if I said, 'okay, I'm going to put my characters through six hells and a half and see what happens.' I need more than that to a book. I want my darkness to at least have some purpose, or at least be an expression of futility - the way it felt at the end of Perdido Stree Station - of escaping The Human Condition or whatever. And this wasn't, to me - it was just gloomy, and there was nothing behind the gloom. And so it became tedious to me, or ineffective. I expected to cry reading this book. I didn't. The fact that I cry at everything just makes my lack of emotion at the end of this book more striking to me.
Secondly, McCarthy left holes in all the wrong places. You learn some things, enough to fill in the holes, but not enough to keep you from stepping in the divets and falling on your face, so to speak. It was too much information for the mystery of what happened, the boy's mother, the world, the enemies to be compelling, to keep me curious the way a lack of names can - as in this, used well - but there was too little to satisfy me. I needed either more than was there or less than was there, and the uncomfortable teetering between them meant that I ended up just feeling like something, somewhere, was missing.
I would have liked to like it. As mentioned, it had the things I wanted to see, it had the ingredients. But somehow, the parts ended up being greater than the sum of the whole. It was the book where I was left staring at the last sentence, not thinking, like with A Brave New World, and not uncertain, like with The Iron Council, but just with dissatisfaction. I didn't know what to do with it, and ultimately, that goes for most of the book - I don't know what to do with it.
It was largely forgettable. I think the only thing I'll remember is the cannibalism. And that's a pity, because I think Cormac McCarthy is a good writer, perhaps - but this book missed the mark with me, by quite a distance.
That's all out of me. This has been stewing for a while. Am now reading The Atrocity Archives, definitely a drastic change in genre - and probably a much needed one. After that, I think I'll dive headlong into some urban fantasy again - Caitlin R. Kiernan - and see how that goes.
As always, anyone with dissenting thoughts is welcome to tell me what I have missed.