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sublime to the ridiculous
Sunday, 23 November 2008 11:32 amI've had Cormac McCarthy's The Road sitting in my bookshelf at intervals for about a year, and I have consistently and indefensibly wimped out of actually reading it, despite exhortations from my inner academic wannabe, two thirds of my book club and most of Teh Internets. Yesterday, no doubt spurred by the fact that I should actually be writing a seminar paper for next week, I took it down and read it in one great, wincing, awed, alienated, visceral gulp.
Wow. This is the stripped-down essence of post-apocalyptic fiction, the whole genre-based flying buttresses of social context and technological nightmare cordially ignored in favour of the most basic human concerns: character, fatherhood, love, survival, good and evil. The post-apocalyptic context is important only in as much as it illuminates them, not for its own sake. McCarthy's prose is luminous, fractured, emblematic; it perfectly reflects and constructs the fractured, emblematic world it describes. This book is a gut-punch. It leaves you wrung, devastated and strangely hopeful. It's what genre could and should be.
It's also, incidentally, about to be a movie starring Viggo Mortensen, and I have to say, fangirly appreciation aside, his tendency to understatement as an actor and his air of gritty competence are perfectly matched to the character.
That being all a bit heavy, this hearty up-yours from The Daily Mash made me (a) realise quite how heavily my cultural sensibilities are imprinted on Britishness, particularly foul language, and (b) laugh until I choked. For some reason the sudden change in the coloured words really amused me. (Warning: rude).
Wow. This is the stripped-down essence of post-apocalyptic fiction, the whole genre-based flying buttresses of social context and technological nightmare cordially ignored in favour of the most basic human concerns: character, fatherhood, love, survival, good and evil. The post-apocalyptic context is important only in as much as it illuminates them, not for its own sake. McCarthy's prose is luminous, fractured, emblematic; it perfectly reflects and constructs the fractured, emblematic world it describes. This book is a gut-punch. It leaves you wrung, devastated and strangely hopeful. It's what genre could and should be.
It's also, incidentally, about to be a movie starring Viggo Mortensen, and I have to say, fangirly appreciation aside, his tendency to understatement as an actor and his air of gritty competence are perfectly matched to the character.
That being all a bit heavy, this hearty up-yours from The Daily Mash made me (a) realise quite how heavily my cultural sensibilities are imprinted on Britishness, particularly foul language, and (b) laugh until I choked. For some reason the sudden change in the coloured words really amused me. (Warning: rude).
