01 June 2010
My reviews
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
The Road is ostensibly about a man and boy surviving day to day following an untold apocalyptic event that has left the world barren and shrouded in darkness. They are attempting to find salvation by reaching the coast, all the while battling the elements, crippling hunger, other survivors and the voice in their heads saying that they’d just be better off dead.
McCarthy pared down prose echoes the landscape in a way that is at first very difficult to get used but then becomes integral to experience of reading this book. Some of the passages truly are poetic. This book is an example of when less can be infinitely more; when what isn’t said or described is almost more important than what is. This is goes even as far as leaving the characters nameless. It’s a subtle way of allowing ‘the man’ to be any man; it’s not Bob Smith wandering the around, it could be anyone – including you. It doesn’t matter what his name is because it says nothing about who he is at the world’s end.
The simplicity of the sentences belies the complexity of story and the skill of writer and this meticulously realised post-apocalyptic hell feels all too plausible given the current way of the real world. The words bleak and unforgiving in no way do justice to this book. The unremitting misery of the character’s fight for survival can feel as choking as the foul air that they are breathing, but beneath the desperation is a story of true love and hope. There is a touching balance and inter-dependence between innocence of the boy, who has known no other world than the one buried under ash, and the father, who knows full well how it will all end.
The book has a lot to say on our relationship with the world, and particularly man’s drive for survival and proclivity for searching for meaning, when all meaning appears lost. The story works best when it is just the man and boy making their way along the road; I found that some of the subtleties of the meditations on life and god are lost on occasions where they bump into strangers and ‘the message’ seems a little shoe-horned in. That said, these encounters managed to convey more on what it is to be human than countless other entire books.
The end left me with a strong mix of heavily conflicting feelings, and I know that most will not be happy with it for one reason or other. I for one have no idea how I would have wanted it to end, probably because. This book will really stay with me for a long time because it is the first that has ever made me genuinely cry from having really cared about the characters, and for that, I can’t praise it enough.
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
In the End of Faith Sam Harries argues that we are reaching a point where essentially religion will be the end of us all, unless secular atheists stand up to fundamentalist and moderate religionists alike.
This book, literally, starts with bang, and Harris doesn’t really let up for the rest of the book in an almost relentless barrage of arguments and ideas laying pretty much all the world’s ills at the doorstep of religion, and in a post 9/11 world, Islam in particular – an entire chapter is devoted to The Problem with Islam, and 4 pages to quotes from the Koran advocating violence against unbelievers.
There is definitely a need for this kind of book, which is not afraid to skirt around difficult issues, and ignores the trend for diffidence in the majority of books dealing with the problems faced in a world where religious proponents hold a great deal of sway over the lives of many.
Harris certainly has the courage of his convictions; the book is very strongly worded and definitely falls into the ‘militant atheist’ camp (although I really hate that phrase). Whilst, largely, well argued, some of the book will not sit well with some, particularly the advocacy of torture, futility of pacifism and essentially fighting fire with fire.
I enjoyed the section on the empiricism of Mysticism and the need and justification for claiming spirituality as something which is compatible with a rational, atheistic outlook, but found the majority of the book a little scatter-gun in its approach.
The End of Faith is full of great pithy, quotable one liners, but I found it lacking as a cohesive argument, however forcefully it was argued.
Pygmy
by Chuck Palahniuk
In a sense this is very much what you would expect of a Chuck Palahniuk novel: inventive narration (more of which later), outlandish characterisation, gratuitous sex and violence and biting, if a little heavy handed, satire.
The story is told in the Pidgin English of a child terrorist agent from an unknown communist state, who has been dispatched to America to infiltrate an all American family and commit an act of terrorism designed to bring the country to it’s knees.
First things first: the narrative. Using broken English allows Palahniuk to ignore any form of subtlety (which has never been too much of a concern for him anyway) and be nothing less than brutal in sending up Western consumerism and American culture. The language does take a while to get use to; the tone is a little uneven, and I found it took longer to read than most novels because I was constantly re-reading passages in order to make sense of them. I didn’t mind this too much however as on the whole I thought it worked very well and was quite cleverly used.
However, revealing the story as a series of reports back to the homeland doesn’t really work when we have to recap events the precede the visit to America in order to get some back story on the character – it was an unnecessary distraction from the story, and as I’ve written in other reviews of Palahniuk’s books, just one idea too many.
It says a lot for the book it is the language rather than the story itself that has driven much of this review, which is shame a because I actually really enjoyed it. Pygmy makes for a pretty complex character despite the mechanised personality drummed into him, and there is a palpable sense of tension and Operation Havoc draws near. The trials and tribulations of the adoptive family make for great, if at times cartoonish, reading.
Spoiler alert!
Some of the violence is just half a step away from being too far; the encounter between Pygmy and the clear-yellow bully makes for brutal reading, but then, through the eyes of Pygmy, the massacre in the gym takes on an almost comical tone.
Spoiler ends
The jacket describes the book as a comedy, which might be a bit of a stretch, although it did score a pretty high wry-smile count. An excellent take on Western imperialism and his finest book since Fight Club, but that’s not the ringing endorsement it should be, given some of the uneven dross in between.
The Gum Thief
by Douglas Coupland
Written as a series of letters between two employees at a Staples stationary outlet (and later various members of their friends and families), this is a story of one man’s battle with himself and his mid-life crisis and a young goth finding out who she is under all her make up.
It’s touching and clever as the beginning of the book unfolds as letters between the two main characters, but the novel falls apart as more and more letters are flying around in order to incorporate more characters in to the mix; it all becomes a little unbelievable.
I normally hate stories within a story as they’re usually too knowing for their own good but I really enjoyed them here, Glove Pond and Toast are fantastic swipes at the pretensions that drown writers.
The book is full of neat observations; one of the character’s musings on what it means to be you and what part of ‘you’ is alive are brilliant, but it’s also littered with unnecessary ‘zeitgeisty’ references to google and youtube, which feel a little contrived and like Coupland is clutching for something that made Generation X so good.
10 September 2010
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