Three highways through their own separate hells.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road: A
Paul Park, Celestis: B+
Roger Zelazny, Damnation Alley: C-

The atomic post-apocalypse, as a warning or as a story unto itself, originated roughly in September, 1945 and has been flogged so mercilessly since that time, it’s become a field of cliché so barren of fruit that authors tread there at their peril. So here’s Cormac McCarthy stumbling from general acclaim into the genre ghetto to explore those time-hardened paths. I admit to a certain skepticism about his effort, and his opening page, a gimmicky affair of stripped-down prose style, deficient of quotation marks and apostrophes but rich in fragmented sentences and filthy with verbed and adjectived nouns, supported my prejudice.* It took a couple of paragraphs to break down my cynical defenses, but by the time I got to “read me a story Papa,” I couldn’t pull away. This may be the best story of its kind that I’ve read.

McCarthy introduces us to an unnamed pair of protagonists, a man and his son, who are struggling to survive in a world gone empty. Their existence consists of struggling to find the last scraps of food on a murdered earth, as they make their way south, in the blind hope that maybe, somewhere, something isn’t dead. The language, as I’ve noted, is spare. The conversations are minimal. There is background only as needed–the characters know no more about the fall of society than we do, and there’s no one to really ask. The man and the son have each other and no more. The love there is so fierce in the face of cataclysm, and communicated in so few words (“read me a story”) that reading about it feels like being struck. To the characters, this reason to live is no blessing.

The world that McCarthy presents is so depleted of life that it is hard for the reader to accept, but it’s drilled in so remorselessly and constantly that it will get into your brain. There is nothing alive on that earth, no green, no color, no sun, no insects, no birds. It’s filled with forests of dead, black trees and gray grass, drifting ash muddied with sterile rain, and unrotted human corpses. All that survives is the tiny handful of people who have been resourceful enough to sift through the sparse dregs at the very bottom. (Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was left wondering if the earth was so thoroughly poisoned to kill even the bugs, how it was that a rag-tag bunch of men were still breathing. So did the characters, no doubt.) Of those few that remain, most are beyond desperation. In a landscape where death is meaningless, McCarthy still finds some punch in human-scale terrors, showing tragedy as the father and his child would see it: in a furtive breathless glimpse, or with a horrified adult regret. Quickly, he pulls away from these scenes, as though he wants to show them as little as his characters want to see them, and races always back to the fragile pillar of love he’s established between the man and the boy. The technique leaves a mark that is that much more indelible in its dreadfulness.

The two hold on, as they can, to the fire of human dignity. A book like this is almost purely character and setting, but still, there’s a theme, an extra level of meaning, that emerges thin as hope, that turns this from a good book to maybe a great one. (If you’re worried about spoilers, now would be the time to stop reading…) The man sickens over the course of their journey, both physically and morally. He’s forced to make hard compromises to protect his family, and they are not always easy or pretty. The boy is more able to afford a sort of idealism–he’d help the more innocent people they encounter–and this, in contrast to his father, grows from naivete to something approaching holiness. It’s a subtle transition–everything in this story is subtle relative to the obvious and gripping expressions of death and love–of the rewarded diligence sort.

McCarthy is also interested in the redeeming power of words. One of the smaller horrors amid the great ones is the death of language, and the man makes the boy speak and write during their few respites from starvation and flight. Late in the novel, sensing his own impermanence, the man finds he has no more capacity for stories, and tells the boy it’s time to make his own, which he does to his father’s satisfaction. Holding the flame indeed, and passing it here. The book also plays at least one other narrative trick, and it’s a damn subtle light to be seen amid the ashes of the world. There is one paragraph in the middle of the story–right in the scene where the boy acquires his own conscience–in the first person, recollecting the boy’s experiences. Surely, surely this ties into the ending.

Paul Park takes humanity on a much longer trip, out beyond the solar system to our last and only outpost. We accompany a linguist, who made the voyage of many years to study the planet’s aboriginal life found there which is the only other intelligent creatures known. There are actually two indiginous races on the planet–the more common variety is roughly humanoid, with soft, protean features, a biological slave race which is treated by the humans as such with little reservation. The master species (the linguist, Simon, is particularly interested in how the master and slave communicate) has been all but wiped out as a violent nuisance, a rival for the people’s place as top dog. Over time, with biological imperative (and often with convincing surgery), the slaves have adapted themselves to the human presence. The planetary colony is less a masturbatory science fantasy than it is an excuse to make an earthlike (twentieth century American) society in a place far from home, with different rules. It is, of course, a vehicle to examine us, and, like any attempt worth the effort, it’s centered on an engaging story.

The beginning of the novel has the protagonist slouching his way through the colonial theme park of a settlement while the author coyly hints at mankind’s current state of affairs (“how long ago doesn’t matter”). Park escapes cliché by putting us into a credible day-to-day, giving us a feel for Simon’s misanthropic distraction and for Katherine’s (the female protagonist’s) desire to be a Real Girl. It seems, at first, to coalesce toward some sort of anti-slavery mediocrity. The two protagonists, each of them outsiders in their own community, find each other, but what will they learn? It takes a while for Park to establish this question, and then, to answer it, he chucks any convention aside.

What follows is an impressive piece of work. In captivity, Katherine’s medical treatments wear off, and obeying her biological impulses, she and her lover flee along the rocky path to the dark and native portions of the planet. As they get deeper in, Katherine loses grip on humanity and rediscovers the ghosts of her ancestors. Amid the drama of a chase, a disturbing unraveling occurs. The reader is taken on an expert and gradual shift of viewpoint from human to alien, from our own blundering language of ideals and dreams, to something subtle, complex, and doomed. Man, meanwhile, diminishes in stature over the course of the trek. It’s gradually revealed what happened to earth (nothing special, we merely ate it bare), and how our last empty effort is inflicting the same fate on a species that was, but for us, successful. Simon, our most sympathetic human, can’t do better than project his own blind insecurities and clumsy hopes onto Katherine as he too wrecks the place. It’s bleak, marginally more alive than McCarthy’s view, but much less hopeful. Park pierces mankind’s high motives right through to our black, broken heart. It’s an allegory as unflinching as it is damning.

Park takes too long–half the book–to prepare for this journey, too much time to set up our expectations. But he knocks them down with such brilliant passion, it’s worth holding out. Just don’t expect to be uplifted.

Celestis had its slow bits, but it was such a noble effort, and the second half was so intriguing, that it can hardly be called a failure. Sometimes those experiments go awry, but you appreciate the effort. Other efforts just suck outright, some through incompetence, and some–even worse–through neglect. Damnation Alley is basically phone-it-in crap that Roger Zelazny cranked out on demand and foisted on his unsupecting fans. Though in his defense, it’s my understanding that he badly needed the money.

Damnation Alley is bad. It is so bad that I was angry at the author for his one or two pockets of attempted good writing that forced me against an easy blanket condemnation. (The film based on this book–released in the same year as Star Wars and starring Col. Hannibal and that dude from Airwolf–was in turn such a sucking black hole of cheesy craptasm that Zelazny asked that his name be removed from the credits. I can only imagine.) A generation after the apocolypse, and the earth’s weather system is a clever mess, with massive tornadoes sucking debris into the upper atmosphere, contaminating the sky, raining detritus and making flight impossible (these are some of the well-described parts, by the way, a whole seven paragraphs worth). The interior of the American continent is a radioactive hellhole, but the last rebel biker, one eponymous Hell Tanner is sent across by land with a plague antidote for the surviving people of Boston.

Zelazny in particular could have done a lot with that setting. He’s an essential pulp writer who could achieve moments of genius. (Others may see him as a brilliant writer slogging in the sf pulps, but I disagree. A Rose for Ecclesiastes, This Mortal Mountain, and the rest of his ghetto-acclaimed work are soporific.) He was at his best when he mixed high attempts with a rollicking pulp style and sensibility. Lord of Light was, in parts, amazing. Jack of Shadows was silly, but total fun throughout. Damnation Alley, however, just failed horribly in the execution. Hell Tanner crosses the continent. He drives around some bats and brakes for a snake. Shoots a big spider. Gets rained on. Smokes. Meets some people. The dialogue is ridicuolous; the characters I didn’t care about; the action is uninvolved; and if the setting was a good thought, it was lame when ultimately traversed. Here is a master at the bottom of his craft. Go read some of his pulp garbage instead. At least it may entertain.

* I actually think the opening riff was a mistake, though a minor one. It’s a dream that’s confusing in the context of the rest of the book.

[index of reviews]

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