Well, been a while since I’ve done any sort of diary-type entry, so here goes:
Did a bit of a tour for BLOOD OIL, which I’ve told you about I’m sure. Did a gig at Inverloch library to a lovely (and surprisingly large, and not just because my step dad was there – he looks a bit like Peter Jackson you see, circa LOTR filming) crowd. Anyway, hello Inverloch people! I judged a short story comp for which I’ll be attending an awards ceremony next weekend, and I don’t have much to say about the entries other than kids can write and most adults can’t. Caught up with John Birmingham and some of his blog buddies – Burgers to those in the know. Birmo has a new novel out, WITHOUT WARNING, which is kinda like every novel I’ve written wrapped between two covers – it’s huge, and it’s good. I’ll read it in the new year when I can dedicate that kinda time and headspace. Been having a Radiohead revival lately, lately my iPod seems to play nothing but, and IN RAINBOWS is particularly good. Cleaned my office, put all my papers in neat piles which I might go through one day but doubt it, got some big fruit trees for my balcony (two pear, two orange), watched a few DVD’s but nothing stand-out, re-reading (nice and slow) TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Each year I auction off a couple character’s names in Fox books, for charity, and this year both are going to the Cancer Foundation. One sold a couple weeks ago, the other auction/charity event is this weekend, and I’ll do a blog post later in the year with these character’s names and their roles in the books (basically, the more they pay at the charity auction, the longer their character lives). Doing a launch at Scotch College this Friday, which I guess I’ll shave for – did I mention I’ve grown a beard? I’ve had not much else to do lately, so I’ve been learning piano and growing a beard, both activities that I can do at home with minimal fuss. Later this month I am talking at the Balwyn Library, and Box Hill TAFE, the latter with my mate Andrew Hutchinson who’ll be crashing here so I really should sort out the spare room (it’s something of a music, papers, and yoga-ball room at the mo and has not benefited from my cleaning mood). Oh, and a week or so ago I gave a six-hour class to a group of young teenagers at the Queensland Writer’s Centre – it was brilliant, the kids were far smarter than most adults I’ve met and the day flashed by at warp speed, certainly faster than Virgin took off from the airport on the way home (I mean really, did we need to turn around and go back just because the weather computer was out? Look out the window. And really, can’t a fifty million dollar jet fly through any and all Australian clouds???). Anyway, hello Queensland kids if you’re reading this – you are all stars.
And with kids in mind, my new book ALONE has been read by a few pro-readers and the response has been better than expected. Two of them said it’s the best book I’ve written, which is a bit worrisome as it took me 16 days to write compared to 3 months to write BLOOD OIL but then it is a very different book: it’s aimed at teenage readers but these two adults (Tony and Em, if you must know) enjoyed it as much as they’ve enjoyed pretty much any book, and they read more books than most people I know (funny, typing that then I was thinking about how Harper’s Scout speaks – it’s been great to go back into that world, those summer’s making fun with Jem). Anyway, I’m still waiting to hear from a select few teenage readers, then I’ll make any changes in a month or so and get it in to the publishers as a good, solid first book in a series. Meantime, I’m tapping away at Fox 4, and I’m very happy to tell you all that my writing has really moved along since writing this kids book (yes mum, you were right). Watch out for more info coming here soon…
Oh, and for readers in Sydney who saw a Sun Herald profile on me a couple weeks back, the journo got quite a lot wrong, which is not unusual with any profile piece – I might make a perpetual list here one day of all the wrong stuff they’ve written about me over the years. Anyway, it happens to us all and the stuff-ups are only getting bigger and worse as journalists are getting lazier and more time-poor - I’ll leave you with a little snippet from Ricky Gervais’ blog:
During an interview in America recently the subject came up about me ad libbing in all my film roles and what it’s like for me not being in charge as usually I write and direct myself.
I explained that I’m usually taken on with that remit and I said that directors usually hire me knowing that I will bring something to the role. I said, “If they wanted someone to stand where they’re told and just say the lines as they’re written in the script then they should chose any other actor to do that.”
Obviously that was taken out of context by an english news site. i wont embarrass them as they are going to right the wrong, but this is the headline they went with. “Gervais admits he is the worst actor in Hollywood” Gervais admits he is the worst actor in Hollywood Brilliant. The thing that annoys me is this. They know exactly what they are doing. It’s not a mistake. It’s deliberate. The world would be a different place if things had always been like this.
Martin Luther King - “I have a dream.”
TheDailyShit.com - “Lazy black man always sleeping”
Jesus Christ - “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
WeeklyRumour.co.uk - “Scruffy Jew starts riot”
Elizabeth I - “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”
InternetCuntWhoCan’tGetArealJob.Net - “Scrawny cannibal lezzer eats own father”
Can’t wait for tomorrow’s headlines… Gervais says he’s as misunderstood as Dr. King. Virgin Queen and Son Of God.
It’s been a busy few weeks for me. The third Lachlan Fox novel, BLOOD OIL, came out late August. I’ve toured for it and I’m happy with the final product and the feedback from readers is so far, so good. Other than that, I started another novel late August, and finished it mid-September. It’s outside the Fox series and it has 15 year-old protagonists, so I guess it’s a teenage-audience book, but I like to think that all ages will read it as it’s an archetypal story of identity and survival told in a way I’ve never seen or heard. I wrote it un-contracted and it will be interesting to see what publishers think of it.
Highlights from what I’ve been reading…
James Frey’s BRIGHT SHINY MORNING. He’s described it as a love letter to LA, only the kind of letter you’d write to a lover you’ve been with for ten years. It’s that and more. I caught up with Frey when he was in Melbourne and he mentioned that he’s very much carrying the torch of Norman Mailer which was nice to hear because that’s exactly how I think of Frey’s writing: he works in prose but he’s essentially, like Mailer, an essayist and chronicler of the self and the times around him. His best subject has been himself, much like Mailer, a man I never met Mailer and it’s a regret because I sense that he, the artist, the observer, was the most interesting part of his fictional creation. Mailer never really had the big novel that I’m sure he’d hoped for, certainly not as big as his precursor Hemingway. Much of his best work are now period pieces, which is not a bad thing in itself and they were important and current and immediate reads at the time I’m sure (AN AMERICAN DREAM, and WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM?). In this regard he was closer to Orwell, who was an essayist better than a prose writer and his books lacked any real future importance. Frey mentioned that in a discussion he had when dear old Mailer was still alive, that the man said to him and I may paraphrase: “You’re it now. It was Hemingway and then me and now it’s you.” I think that anxiety of influence crippled whatever real originality Mailer might have developed, as it did to Hemingway with his artistic competition to Tolstoy. Hemingway’s greatness was his short stories, which rival any other master of that form, Joyce, Chekhov, Babel, and he’s certainly the best short story writer we’ve seen since Joyce’s DUBLINERS (although my readers will know I have an affinity for Proulx and Winton as modern virtuosos of the sublime). Hemingway was the master of ellipses and his longer works, particularly THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, misses this virtue of aesthetic economy. William Faulkner praised this book as Hemingway’s best but then his taste was a little off some of the time. It’s at once a Christian parable and a work of sentimentality and it’s far too much for the novel to bear. To Frey’s credit he has none of that. I’d not say Frey’s strongest point of writing is his brevity for he details his prose as a painter might paint a canvas and apply stroke after stroke to built a picture that’s as rich as it is intriguing but what he achieved as a writer of literature is develop a parataxis that is at the forefront of achievement of 21C writers. I have no doubt that one day in the not too distant future, should Frey tackle an issue that strikes a chord with a time or generation, such as Mailer did with his VIETNAM etc, then he will receive the recognition that he deserves and strives for. He will be studied at universities, they will no doubt incorrectly read his work, but he will be appreciated as a poet observer beyond the limited view we have of Mailer, because he’s capable of better writing. Frey has written about his writing process that he approaches the page and task much like a method actor, to really get into the mindset that the given scene requires. I’ve tried that with some of my works but have found it to be too self-destructive and dangerous to everything around me. I do hope, and I trust, that Frey will get to write a canonical novel beyond the immediate that will last the ages and place him in his country’s best writers, to make them, as he says, insignificant. The danger, if he does not achieve this, as I believe that Hemingway realized he had not produced a novel to beat Tolstoy (THE SUN ALSO RISES came closest, but even it was beaten by Hemingway’s own short work, seen in much of the FIRST FORTY-NINE STORIES). In a letter to his publisher Charles Scribner, Hemingway wrote: “Am a man without any ambition, except to be champion of the world, I wouldn’t fight Dr. Tolstoy in a 20 round bout because I know he would knock my ears off. … If I can live to 60 I can beat him. (MAYBE).” Hemingway’s suicide at 61 had its reasons beyond anything hereditary and more than any sickness, like we saw only a few years ago in Dr Gonzo, another genius journalist-writer. Sadly, that door in the psyche is still an option for too many talented, ambitious artists, particularly and usually young men, which I might discuss in detail another day.
If we look at 20C American literature Nathaniel West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS rates right up there. Pynchon couldn’t touch him, only Faulkner holds the higher title. Of living writers, McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN ranks, as does DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. Steinbeck was crippled by the shadow of Hemingway, as I believe Mailer was crippled to produce a work of sublime aesthetic achievement by Mailer himself, a Mailer constantly sparring with both himself and Hemingway. I mention these writers because of this: Faulkner’s AS I LAY DYING, West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS, Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, and BLOOD MERIDIAN, UNDERWORLD, etc, go on through time to prove to us what literature can do, and these works go on harming and teaching and killing us with every read.
I don’t think that such a canonical work is beyond his reach of Frey and it’s certainly within the scope of his ambition. He has the ambition to be heavyweight champion of the literature world, to obliterate the others - if there are any remaining with similar ambitions - into obscurity, and I love him for it. The best I can hope to muster would be to muscle up and fight these guys, as Hemingway did against Stevens - which I’ve written about here before - and I like to think I’d be able to rank pretty high in those stakes. Sure, it’s been tempting to me as it is for so many young writers to write something of such worth and greatest that it will be remembered through all time as something of the finest aesthetic beauty, and maybe one day I’ll dedicate the time to do that but maybe I’ll just keep at my thing, whatever that is. At any rate, Frey’s proved with his third novel that he has reach beyond himself, and produced something that isn’t too restricted to time and place, which is a reach greater than Mailer could ever muster as he placed himself too near events time and time again. Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES is Mailer’s ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF and BRIGHT SHINY MORNING could well be THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG. Mailer was his own best fiction complete with every nuance New Journalism brought along. Frey was there and now he’s broken the mould and stretched his wings. Mailer wrote in ADVERTISEMENTS: “…I pointed to the farthest fence and said within ten years I would try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters. For if I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner ad even old moldering Hemingway might have come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.” Hemingway characterized ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, in a letter to George Plimpton, “as a sort of ragtag assembly of his rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings shot through with occasional brilliance.” It’s easy to read Frey and say that he might share much with Mailer, much more than we may ever realize. Mailer as described by Richard Poirier: “…insists on living at the divide, living on the divide, between the world of recorded reality and the world of omens, spirits, and powers, only that his presence may blur the distinction. He seals and obliterates the gap that he finds, like a sacrificial warrior or, as he would probably prefer, like a Christ who brings not peace but a sword, not forgiveness for past sins but an example of the pains necessary to secure a future.”
Over the coming years I’m excited to watch just how far the reach of James Frey can go, and I look forward to him carrying the torch another leg of this great relay, to hit the ball out of the park and show the world what literature can still achieve.
What I’ve been writing…
My newest novel, titled ALONE.
I’ve read a heap of “Young Adult” fiction because I’ve just written my first, a little break in-between writing Fox novels. I read like 50 or so, from Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl (a couple of my childhood favs) to Robert Muchamore and Matthew Reilly. The older books still hold up, even Marsden’s TOMORROW Series reads well, so does OSC’s ENDERS GAME. I flinch at a lot of Blyton, as I’ve done with other period pieces of fiction that I’ve re-read as an adult like LORD OF THE FLIES and KING SOLOMON’S MINES, and while there’s still something to like in them they never live up to the memories of the first read when I was full of youthful ignorance and ready to be carried away. Contemporary YA fiction, with the exception of perhaps Jasper Fforde (if you’d call his stuff YA) is so utterly boring. It’s action and thrills but it’s hollow and doesn’t say much about anything. Golding’s first novel in LORD OF THE FLIES is relevant today but only if you are a teenage private school boy, likely an English one at that, who identifies with those weak characters; that’s all those characters were, private English school boys, and that’s all they ever will be, products of an author who had been through that system and continued a similar one by serving in the Navy and further residing in that system in teaching. I just now re-read Huck Finn, and yes, again I flinch at the language that we now know to be very non-PC, but Huck has so much more depth than any of Golding’s characters. Huck has irony, not seen in Ralph et al, and Golding’s “creations” are no more than humourless names with embarrassingly small views and ridiculously limited minds. There’s nothing universal about LORD OF THE FLIES, it certainly is not an allegory of moral depravity, it’s nothing more than a story of a few cardboard private school boys continuing their existence in a situation that a mature writer would have explored and mined for richness beyond the literal and expected, making names on a page resonate through the ages.
Now that books are marketed to kids like never before we need some bright shiny voices and stories available that are beyond the ordinary. We need the KIM and HUCK of today. So, I’ve created Jesse, in my first YA novel, ALONE. It’s McCarthy’s THE ROAD but set during the apocalyptic event rather than years after, with four teenagers at the centre as seen through Jesse’s eyes and without the overt writerly influences that hampers McCarthy’s effort. ALONE is a product of today and written for today’s readers and like THE ROAD, LIFE OF PI, THE BOOK THEIF, THE ALCHEMIST, ENDERS GAME, THE HOBBIT, THE LITTLE PRINCE, and SIDDHARTHA, I can see it will be read by adults as well as teenagers as well as advanced kids, and I hope they all identify with the archetypal qualities in the story. We follow four teenagers for three weeks and we see how they cope and survive in a city that has been attacked, and through it Jesse struggles with his identity and ego and self as much as his friends’. It holds no punches. It’s raw and it’s real and it will be interesting to see what publishers think of it. Clearly I’m biased - but I’ve admitted on many occasions to not liking my previous work when I’m working gone the next project - and this has not happened with ALONE. I’m writing FOX 4 and 5 back-to-back, as the storyline and through-arcs carry through them both and I figure it’s smart to mine this creative zone that I’m in while it lasts. But when I think back about those four lonely characters in ALONE, I still love them and I love their story and it was a great month of writing. I’ve looked back and felt that way about anything I’ve ever written. Usually I’m glad the writing ordeal is over and the world I’d created and lived in for months on end is behind me.
What I’ve been watching…
A few DVD’s.
GONG BABY GONE. Enjoyed it about as much as the book. The twists still worked, even though I expected what was coming. Ben Affleck did a great job of directing. The only thing I had issues with was the small jump cuts in the scene where they were in the house of the mother - they worked fine, but it seemed out of place as a device and the first couple jarred until I was used to it. Still, it’s a little thing, like the little things I pointed out with Tony Gilroy’s first effort in MICHAEL CLAYTON. Make no mistake, both these guys can direct better than most, it’s just my super-critical eye because I expected so much. What pleased me the most with both their efforts is that they have such a minimal, old-school approach that is not reliant on any visual gimmickry.
STREET KINGS. I like David Ayer and I expected so much from this film and it didn’t deliver. TRAINING DAY was a deceptively good script and well acted and executed. In fact, I didn’t love it that much on the first run through but after reading the script and re-watching I got so much more from it, but perhaps that’s either me not being in the mood in the first instance to take it all in, or they filmmakers didn’t do a good enough job putting the script to screen. I suspect a bit of both. HARSH TIMES remains my favourite Ayer film and it’s small-budget genius. Chris Bale and Freddy Rodriguez were perfect; Bale’s character was utterly riveting and frightening and most importantly incredibly empathetic, which cemented Bale in my mind as one of the best actors around. Anyway, STREET KINGS could have been the story that I wanted to write, and when I’d read early news about it I was disappointed that I’d never get to write a similar novel that I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while, the third of a cop trilogy. But, I will write that novel one day soon, about a cop who’s hard and tough as can be because of the two novels before it (both storylines of which came to me in separate dreams with the same cop characters – go figure), because STREET KINGS and its ridiculous cast did not deliver.
Gotta love him, here’s a little from a recent NY Times article:
He is not, as children’s book writers are often supposed, an everyman’s grandpapa. His hatreds are fierce and grand, as if produced by Cecil B. DeMille. He hates his uncle (who made a cruel comment about him when he was a boy); he hates anything to do with God or religion, and Judaism in particular (“We were the ‘chosen people,’ chosen to be killed?”); he hates Salman Rushdie (for writing an excoriating review of one of his books); he hates syrupy animation, which is why he is thrilled with Mr. Jonze’s coming film of his book “Where the Wild Things Are,” despite rumors of studio discontent.
“I hate people,” he said at one point, extolling the superior company of dogs, like his sweet-tempered German shepherd, Herman (after Melville).
He is, at heart, a curmudgeon, but a delightful one, with a vast range of knowledge, a wicked sense of humor and a talent for storytelling and mimicry.
When Mr. Sendak received the 1996 National Medal of Arts, President Bill Clinton told him about one of his own childhood fantasies that involved wearing a long coat with brass buttons when he grew up.
“But Mr. President, you’re only going to be president for a year more,” Mr. Sendak said, “you still have time to be a doorman.”
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/arts/design/10sendak.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&oref=slogin
G’day readers,
Chances are that your local store in Brisbane, Sydney, or Melbourne now has signed books - while stocks last!
I have been on a whirlwind book tour of the east coast capital cities and have signed copies of the just-released BLOOD OIL, as well as some of the paperback editions of FOX HUNT and PATRIOT ACT. Along the way I’ve met dozens (perhaps hundreds!) of wonderful bookstore owners and staff, which as I publish more and more books they are feeling more and more like my extended publishing family.
Early this coming week I will post a list of the stores that I visited, as well as my upcoming public appearances.
Thanks for your continued support in buying my books, and I do hope that you enjoy this latest Lachlan Fox story. I’m very pleased (and as usual, somewhat surprised!) that the feedback so far from early readers, bookstore staff, and media, has been brilliant.
Cheers,
JP.
You’ll recall I recently compared McCarthy’s Boy IN THE ROAD to the Son of Macduff. It seems it resonates with me to this day; perhaps I am growing something of a paternal nature. Maybe it’s an awakening of the anxiety of influence. Certainly, I am always not too far from Shakespeare in my thoughts, writerly and otherwise. Still I cannot comprehend much of what makes Hamlet such a character at what, twenty years of age? Perhaps it’s that I see Shakespeare’s own son in Hamlet’s eyes, as I see the Bard as the Ghost, who we know he played on stage. This has been on my mind for years now, and I release upon rereading my own text that there’s the skeleton of both Hamlet and his father’s Ghost in the Lachlan Fox we meet in BLOOD OIL. I’ve written in such territory before, only it’s more thinly veiled now; Shakespeare, who named both father and son Hamlet in that play, lead to germ of an idea in a short story that I wrote titled “Soliloquy for One Dead.” Indeed it is a soliloquy, because if there is one thing that I am more keenly aware of over anything else, it’s that Shakespeare taught me this: how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.
I don’t follow a particular faith. My parents were raised Catholic and decided to teach me all religions, something that I am eternally grateful for. There is suppressed Judaism in my ancestry and I attended a primary school where we sang Hebrew folk songs in class more often than any Celtic traditionals. As an adult, I’m probably more drawn to Buddhism that any other organised belief, though not without subjectivity. I take few pains to point out that I am open to all reasonable beliefs of faith and respect all those before me; I’m sure this is evident to those who know me. All this said, I am a steadfast follower of Bardolatry, the worship of Shakespeare, which should be even more of a secular religion than it already is. His plays are the outward limit of human achievement, never to be reached by us mortals, and I belong to the school, of which Harold Bloom must be the headmaster, that acknowledges Shakespeare as the inventor of humanity. Bloom posits this by saying that his plays abide beyond the mind’s reach, that we have no hope of catching up to them. But more on that another day.
I bring up religion here because I went to a christening the other day, the Catholic baptism of an infant. I can’t agree that babies are born into original sin (which is the one element of baptism that I am talking about here); it seems to me odd that such an innocent should pay for sins that Jesus himself paid the ultimate sacrifice for, let alone the fact that a months old human has the capacity to sin. After the christening, I said this to some of the attendees, and when pressed I gave the age that I thought such a cleansing of the soul to be seven. This is the age of mens rea, I said, to which they looked dumbfounded, which disappointed but didn’t surprise me. I joked that I could perhaps be baptised that day as well. They laughed and said: you’re too old. I’m twenty nine, I said. Far too old, was chorused, even a couple laughs. Jesus was twenty nine when he was baptised. More dumbfounded silence, accompanied with uncomfortable looks. I was left wondering how many of them knew the Book by which they lived, and which version they knew. Instead, I quipped that Christopher Marlowe died at twenty nine, and wondered aloud what would have happened had John the Baptist accidentally drowned Jesus at twenty nine. Or if Marlow’s friend Shakespeare had left us at twenty nine, how the world would be a different place because we would think and feel and speak differently. Our ideas would be different, particularly our ideas of the human, since they were, more often than not, Shakespeare’s ideas before they were our own. Bloom taught me that much and Shakespeare has proved it to me time and time again in ways that go beyond literal meanings. Frye too has added to my understanding of the symmetry of verse in almost every text I read, stemming from the work of Blake that Frye took to the point of conviction by articulating that the Bible provided Western societies with the mythology which informed all of Western literature.
Most of us, like those present that christening day, would probably cite the King James Bible as the version de jure, even if it is the product of the Church of England and the Book of protestants. In true Australian form, most of my ancestry hails from Ireland, so the irony here is not lost. Certainly, I find the KJ version the most lyrical of biblical prose that I have read, and it seems ingrained in my consciousness as I hear its metre when I read Hemmingway and Steinbeck and Lincoln and now in Obama’s oratorical timbre in the audio book version of his refreshing “An Audacity of Hope”. That this version of the bible was written in Shakespeare’s time fascinates me to the point that I will write about it fully some other day.
This thinking about the purity of children’s souls had me thinking as I watched two films the other night: The Kite Runner (2007) and The Italian (2005). There’s something in the performances of these child actors that belies their age and in their inherent innocence something transcends expectations and moves me so. The two young actors in the Kite Runner were more than worthy at playing the roles of Hosseini’s creation and their portrayals will stay with me for some time. I am a fan of Marc Forster and he did exceptionally well here. The Italian, part of a recent vanguard of remerging brilliance in Russian cinema, was not as technically proficient as Forster’s film but then I didn’t expect it to be. The boy in this film carried the beauty against the beast of the system that was necessary to make us care beyond the ordinary; the final shot of the film, in the context of the story, was perfection.
Reminiscing here, some of my other favourite child/adolescant performances have been Salvatore Cascio as the little boy in Cinema Paradiso (1998 – original version only), Giorgio Cantarini as the son in La Vita e bella (1997), and Oksana Akinshina in LILJA 4-EVER (2002). Each one of these performances has had that artistic quality that like Shakespeare, like Mozart, like Caballet, like so many great artists, has emotionally moved me in ways that literal meanings can’t. Without Shakespeare, without the writers of what became biblical texts such as the J writer (who I love to believe was a woman), without Aristotle and Plato, I can’t imagine we would have had the cognitive power to comprehend such emotions, let alone have the ability to create such artistic material. And it’s in this artistry that defines us as human. Indeed, in my career as a novelist, every day I am working within the limitless confines of the novel, which can, beyond any other art, encompass all the various disciplines and interests of humanity. I am, forever, deeply entrenched with an anxiety of influence of genius that I cannot know how to touch but I’d hate to live a life without the hope of attempting to try.
I’ll leave the last word here to Bloom, on the study of Shakespeare… “We have to read Shakespeare, and we have to study Shakespeare. We have to study Dante. We have to read Chaucer. We have to read Cervantes. We have to read the Bible, at least the King James Bible. We have to read certain authors…They provide an intellectual, I dare say, a spiritual value which has nothing to do with organized religion or the history of institutional belief. They remind us in every sense of re-minding us. They not only tell us things that we have forgotten, but they tell us things we couldn’t possibly know without them, and they reform our minds. They make our minds stronger. They make us more vital. They make us alive…Shakespeare is universal. Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage…I don’t know who Shakespeare was. He has hidden himself behind all of these extraordinary men and women…One cares about wisdom, and in the end one wants to be judged by wisdom. If one hasn’t got it, one has to ask the biblical question “Where shall wisdom be found?’ And I suppose, for me, the answer is: wisdom is to be found in Shakespeare, provided you get at it in the right way.”
Final quote from: “Harold Bloom Interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel”
Queen’s Quarterly v102, #3 (Fall 1995) PAGES 609-19.
As with all books that I have enjoyed, I wrote a personal review of THE ROAD. For the first time, I will publish it here, and I may start doing this with others I have written to share with the world what some great books and writers have meant to me.
THE ROAD
By Cormac McCarthy
I reread THE ROAD today. It didn’t give me any more than my previous reading but there’s much to like about this book, which is easily McCarthy’s second best effort so far.
The connotation of the Golden Rule that runs throughout the book I think is closer to that of ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus’s understated “What thou avoidest suffering thyself seek not to impose on others” rather than that which we take more commonly as “Do unto Others as You Would Have Them Do unto You”. The image of Norman Rockwell’s Golden Rule painting came to mind at times. Indeed, the man in the painting with his considering hand to his chin may well be the Man of McCarthy’s book, and I like to think its perspective could be that of the Boy as he is seeing this image in a dream where he sees other “Good Guys” and lost children looking to him, the One, illuminating the scene with the fire he carries. George Bernard Shaw once said that “The golden rule is that there are no golden rules” and further criticized it in a language that I could almost hear from the McCarthy’s Man in his words or perhaps within the ellipses: “Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”
One sticking point I had with THE ROAD, again upon rereading, was the appearance of the “Good Guys” at the end. I wont give too much of the ending away here, but I wonder what kind of process McCarthy went through in adding this coda to the continuation of the “Fire within” and that God continues on in some people who have miraculously appeared in the boy’s – The One’s – path. Was it his publisher and agent who rallied for an ending not as bleak as we have come to know in his best work? I think surely that is much the reason for McCarthy’s commercial success with this novel, and its appeal with the likes of the Oprah Book Club: it is a Hollywood ending in the verse of McCarthy’s omnibus, a punch pulled after it had delivered a KO.
Consider the end of BLOOD MERIDIAN, still McCarthy’s strongest work and an unsurpassed look at an apocalyptic America in a Western setting (prior to the timeline of THE ROAD). We have seen through the book a masterpiece of blood and violence against landscape and language and conceptions that build as good a novel as Melville and Pynchon and DeLillio had and have achieved. The novel’s antagonist, Judge Holden, has been compared by Harold Bloom to Iago and the influence of Shakespeare on McCarthy’s writing does not end there; he has, quite brilliantly, gone back to the source material of Shakespeare and painted it in such a veil as we are at once living the characters afresh while being reminded of where they were and who they were and who they’ve been in our minds and hearts since their inception or at least our own personal discovery of them. Too often novelists will take from novelists in a progressive watering down of interpretation – see Steinbeck’s prose as Hemmingway’s biblical read rather than his own interpretation of the Book – and seldom have we read an interpretation that is new at the same time as being Right. Our closing scene of BLOOD MERIDIAN is as bleak as McCarthy has written and deservedly so; it matches the novel and is satisfying in the way that it is despairingly unfair. Just before Judge Holden destroys the Kid and goes on in perpetuity as War Everlasting, there is the sublime conversation that moves us as the final scene in THE ROAD would have if it had of ended with the Boy by his father’s side repeating his name. The Judge of BLOOD MERIDIAN says to the Kid, who we now know will have to give up his soul this night yet shows more defiance than we could expect or dream:
Where is the fiddler, and where the dance?
I guess you can tell me.
I tell you this. As war becomes dishonoured and its nobility called into question those honourable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?
You aint nothing.
McCarthy should have made the penultimate scene of THE ROAD that where the Boy is saying the father’s name over and over again. This is by far the strongest moment in the book and suitable crescendo of emotions that have slowly knotted to get us here. We are so invested in this relationship by this point, as symbiotic and untangleable and eternal, that we have here, finally, reached the point of no return and total and irreconcilable finality of the physical. Yes, we need a coda, as we needed with BLOOD MERIDIAN, but it lays a few pages too late in THE ROAD in the form of the final paragraph. What happens in-between is McCarthy’s shaky ground, his hopeful discourse that would be better served as a lesson earlier in the travels of father and son rather than a lesson learned in the solace of grief interrupted. My scepticism here of these few pages immediately lead to foreboding for what may be imparted on this Boy by these few, a Boy who had promised up until this point so much.
As BLOOD MERIDIAN does not let death – The Judge – have the final word, neither does THE ROAD. Where the formers epilogue is set at dawn and signals some faint form of hope in the new day as a man uses a two-handed implement to strike “the fire out of the rock which God has put there”, THE ROAD ends with a paragraph that takes us back to the reminiscence: “Once there were brook trout in the streams of the mountains” and that “On their back were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.” Again, we a left with a sense that life goes on, albeit not as we have known it nor as we could foresee it, but that hope, somehow, be it in the hand of man or God or nature or probably where they all collide, springs eternal.
THE ROAD is a book at its best in its monotonous repetition of the mundane of survival. It’s also where it falls on its own sword. McCarthy doesn’t quite have the deftness of Hemmingway’s sparse poetry but he’s nonetheless a worthy disciple as a lyricist. As we remember Hemmingway more for his accomplishments with the short story over his attempts at novels, so goes THE ROAD, to be remembered like BLOOD MERIDIAN as a prose epic. As a drawn out short story it is a canonical novella alongside THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, and like Hemmingway’s attempt it is the poorer for its excesses. Hemmingway said in an interview with George Plimpton “…In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened.” There is something hauntingly Hemmingwayesque about this quote and McCarthy’s THE ROAD, almost as if Hemmingway had not suicided he may have written it himself. Certainly the parataxis has trace marks. Perhaps THE ROAD is better as a eulogy to the late lyric master than it is a love note dedicated to McCarthy’s son; more a tip of the hat to Faulkner for his art of the sublime and a tribute to Shakespeare’s legacy as the Creator of Humanity. It could be that here we’ve seen a link in what is a perpetual passing of the baton between generations of great writers.
I heard Neil Young’s “The Heart of Gold” somewhere in the endless wanderings of McCarthy’s Man and Boy, maybe even “Old Man” as well such as when they come to the farmhouse and the Man finds the arrowheads which he give to the Boy and then the coin which like Young’s will not get tossed. The Boy, like Young’s, proves he’s a lot like his father yet has the beautiful disposition bestowed such an innocent and, whether he knows it or not, needs love too. There are echoes of Melville in THE ROAD too, either washing ashore at the beach or in the surf or under it and in the mystery and romanticism and pull of the sea. At the end of reading THE ROAD I was left with the feeling of my life’s excesses. I no longer wanted so much food or drink, nor did I feel like walking a path that might take me to some horizon that offered more light or warmth or humanity or God. I wanted to glue up the windows, turn up the heating, clean what I had, ration what was left. I thought of myself as Boy, that age that I lived in twenty years ago and it seemed close and barren and beyond the now yet I could still taste the memories and feel the cold and hear the silence. My field of view closed and without my glasses seemed an apt reminder that I have not travelled that far and that there is comfort to be had if one is willing to see the world and life for what it is.
I am left with wonderings of the Boy as much as my own fate. I can’t help but think that he would be better off alone with nothing but conversations of his father and, perhaps, the rare kindness of strangers to remind him of the fire that he’s carrying. I’m reminded of the brief vision that Shakespeare gave us of his “Boy, Son to Macduff” (and indeed of Lady Macduff when thinking if McCarthy’s Man). I have often thought of this boy, someone too wise for his age and graced with the Bard’s wit and tongue, who was dispatched with what proved be one of many such acts to come back and haunt the perpetrators and ultimately Macbeth as a sign that we do indeed carry more than fire within us. I wonder what a man he would have become and I suspect I will do so with McCarthy’s creation: it is in their possible futures that we must explore ourselves and perhaps learn to live by and at the very least carry in our hearts forever as a chip of ice among the fire. I saw McCarthy’s Boy much like a longer divulgence on Macduff’s son, and when we see him though a tight lens and hear him speak he may well be one and the same and I can’t help but relish his dialogue as it as if finally Macduff’s son has visited us again and told us It’s all right, I am still here, and so are you, and so we will be. In both Boy’s naïve questioning of a parent and their heart-breaking repetition and familial insights of character’s knowledge as nature-nurture by-product, I see a Boy who can walk the road as well as any man.
Finally, I’ll end with the scene of Macbeth about which I’ve spoken. It would do well to compare the Son’s dialogue with the Boy’s, and to let the imagination fill in the gaps and wonder, eternally, if this is a boy we have personally known.
Macbeth, Act 4
SCENE II. Fife. Macduff’s castle.
Enter LADY MACDUFF, her Son, and ROSS
LADY MACDUFF
What had he done, to make him fly the land?
ROSS
You must have patience, madam.
LADY MACDUFF
He had none:
His flight was madness: when our actions do not,
Our fears do make us traitors.
ROSS
You know not
Whether it was his wisdom or his fear.
LADY MACDUFF
Wisdom! to leave his wife, to leave his babes,
His mansion and his titles in a place
From whence himself does fly? He loves us not;
He wants the natural touch: for the poor wren,
The most diminutive of birds, will fight,
Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.
All is the fear and nothing is the love;
As little is the wisdom, where the flight
So runs against all reason.
ROSS
My dearest coz,
I pray you, school yourself: but for your husband,
He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
The fits o’ the season. I dare not speak
much further;
But cruel are the times, when we are traitors
And do not know ourselves, when we hold rumour
From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,
But float upon a wild and violent sea
Each way and move. I take my leave of you:
Shall not be long but I’ll be here again:
Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward
To what they were before. My pretty cousin,
Blessing upon you!
LADY MACDUFF
Father’d he is, and yet he’s fatherless.
ROSS
I am so much a fool, should I stay longer,
It would be my disgrace and your discomfort:
I take my leave at once.
Exit
LADY MACDUFF
Sirrah, your father’s dead;
And what will you do now? How will you live?
Son
As birds do, mother.
LADY MACDUFF
What, with worms and flies?
Son
With what I get, I mean; and so do they.
LADY MACDUFF
Poor bird! thou’ldst never fear the net nor lime,
The pitfall nor the gin.
Son
Why should I, mother? Poor birds they are not set for.
My father is not dead, for all your saying.
LADY MACDUFF
Yes, he is dead; how wilt thou do for a father?
Son
Nay, how will you do for a husband?
LADY MACDUFF
Why, I can buy me twenty at any market.
Son
Then you’ll buy ‘em to sell again.
LADY MACDUFF
Thou speak’st with all thy wit: and yet, i’ faith,
With wit enough for thee.
Son
Was my father a traitor, mother?
LADY MACDUFF
Ay, that he was.
Son
What is a traitor?
LADY MACDUFF
Why, one that swears and lies.
Son
And be all traitors that do so?
LADY MACDUFF
Every one that does so is a traitor, and must be hanged.
Son
And must they all be hanged that swear and lie?
LADY MACDUFF
Every one.
Son
Who must hang them?
LADY MACDUFF
Why, the honest men.
Son
Then the liars and swearers are fools,
for there are liars and swearers enow to beat
the honest men and hang up them.
LADY MACDUFF
Now, God help thee, poor monkey!
But how wilt thou do for a father?
Son
If he were dead, you’ld weep for
him: if you would not, it were a good sign
that I should quickly have a new father.
LADY MACDUFF
Poor prattler, how thou talk’st!
Enter a Messenger
Messenger
Bless you, fair dame! I am not to you known,
Though in your state of honour I am perfect.
I doubt some danger does approach you nearly:
If you will take a homely man’s advice,
Be not found here; hence, with your little ones.
To fright you thus, methinks, I am too savage;
To do worse to you were fell cruelty,
Which is too nigh your person. Heaven preserve you!
I dare abide no longer.
Exit
LADY MACDUFF
Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world; where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly: why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defence,
To say I have done no harm?
Enter Murderers
What are these faces?
First Murderer
Where is your husband?
LADY MACDUFF
I hope, in no place so unsanctified
Where such as thou mayst find him.
First Murderer
He’s a traitor.
Son
Thou liest, thou shag-hair’d villain!
First Murderer
What, you egg!
Stabbing him
Young fry of treachery!
Son
He has kill’d me, mother:
Run away, I pray you!
Dies
Exit LADY MACDUFF, crying ‘Murder!’ and pursued by the Murderers.
