Not Another Book Club: The Road
Nov. 23rd, 2008 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby(Because better late than never, and I'm clearly spamming your friends list anyway today.)
This month's read was The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
I don't know if "enjoyed" is the right word for this sort of thing. It basically hit a lot of my literary kinks. Post-apocalyptic, check. Grimdark, check. Setting-as-character, check. Stylistic quirks, check.
Talking points, along with spoilers, under the cut.
• The major flaw in post-apocalyptic writing in general is turning it into an escapist fantasy of sorts (I am also guilty of doing this, by the way); the world and the characters suffer a great deal, but in the end the slate has been wiped clean and a better civilization can rise from its ashes. (Even after a Class 4!) McCarthy's portrayal is much more realistic—there is no society, and in the wake of the massive environmental and social devastation he describes, there can probably never be one again. There can only be the determination of the survivors to act ethically, and because there's no future, it becomes collective tragedy rather than individual heroism.
EDIT: I think![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mendaciloquent makes a compelling counter-argument here. Go read that too.
• Other genre tropes: No names (see also: Blindness); no reason given for the disaster (see also: at least half of every post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel ever written). Is this cliché or literary subversion?
• I guess that the most interesting discussion, for those of you who got all the way through it: What did you think of the ending? I felt that it was a cheat, but also that following through on the novel's grim realism would have made the entire story pointless.
I'm sure that there's more I wanted to mention—at any rate, discuss!
This month's read was The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
I don't know if "enjoyed" is the right word for this sort of thing. It basically hit a lot of my literary kinks. Post-apocalyptic, check. Grimdark, check. Setting-as-character, check. Stylistic quirks, check.
Talking points, along with spoilers, under the cut.
• The major flaw in post-apocalyptic writing in general is turning it into an escapist fantasy of sorts (I am also guilty of doing this, by the way); the world and the characters suffer a great deal, but in the end the slate has been wiped clean and a better civilization can rise from its ashes. (Even after a Class 4!) McCarthy's portrayal is much more realistic—there is no society, and in the wake of the massive environmental and social devastation he describes, there can probably never be one again. There can only be the determination of the survivors to act ethically, and because there's no future, it becomes collective tragedy rather than individual heroism.
EDIT: I think
mendaciloquent makes a compelling counter-argument here. Go read that too.• Other genre tropes: No names (see also: Blindness); no reason given for the disaster (see also: at least half of every post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel ever written). Is this cliché or literary subversion?
• I guess that the most interesting discussion, for those of you who got all the way through it: What did you think of the ending? I felt that it was a cheat, but also that following through on the novel's grim realism would have made the entire story pointless.
I'm sure that there's more I wanted to mention—at any rate, discuss!
