One of these two novels is something of a classic, the other will, I think, become one. A quick summary/review of each:

[1] Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (Picador, 1954)

Here’s a book that for decades has resided on high school and college reading lists: its English translation in the 1950s became a spiritual guide to the 1960’s generation of counter-cultural searchers-after-alternative-truth. One commentator calls it ‘the most important and compelling moral allegory the troubled twentieth century has produced’. Set in India, it synthesises Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, along with philosophy and Jungian psychology.

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was a German poet and novelist (and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946), who explored the journey into the inner self. Born into a family of German Pietist missionaries he was expected to follow the family missionary calling but was expelled from seminary, and worked at various jobs in the ‘book trade’. For several years he underwent therapy with Carl Jung’s assistant J.B. Lang.

A visit to India in 1911 was a disappointment but it encouraged Hesse’s fascination with Eastern religions. Siddartha (1922) in some ways parallels the early life of Gautama Buddha (Siddhartha was also the given name of the Buddha). A Brahmin son rebels against his father’s teaching and traditions, and eventually finds enlightenment.

Siddhartha has sometimes been called a work of reverse missionary activity, bringing to the West the lessons of a typically Eastern story of spiritual searching and fulfillment. A spiritual guide assists the protagonist in the quest for self-knowledge beyond the world ‘deluded by money, number and time.’ In each of the novel’s twelve chapters Siddhartha faces a crisis and a new beginning in his search. There are various encounters with individuals who profess to have something to teach him.

He rejects, in turn, the teachings of the Brahmins (their scholarship may lead to intellectual prowess but not necessarily happiness); the rigors of the ascetic samanas; the opportunity to become a disciple of Gautama, the Buddha; the illusory joys of sensual love; the world-weary existence of material success; and even the futile role of protective father to his son. After many struggles Siddhartha finally understands his place in the universe. When he attains ‘enlightenment’ he tells his lifelong friend, ‘The world, Govinda, is perfect at every moment.’

Hesse, in Siddhartha, raises questions about

* the problematic nature of using words to describe life’s deepest truths; (typical English-class questions: ‘What is the relation of words to wisdom? Do words tend to enhance or limit wisdom?’ ‘Why is it possible to gain much knowledge without also gaining wisdom?’);

* the nature of the relationship between a teacher and a disciple (more classroom questions: ‘Can wisdom be taught?’ ‘Why are humans prone to accept another’s formula?’); and

* the futility of thinking one has a absolute ‘handle’ on what is ‘true’ or ‘real’ (after waking up by a river, Siddhartha says, ‘I have nothing, I know nothing, I can do nothing, I have learned nothing. How wondrous this is!’).

(‘Comparative religion’ questions: (1) ‘Judaism is to Christianity as Hinduism is to Buddhism. Please explain.’ (2) ‘Siddartha arrives at a position more akin to Hesse’s instinctive nature-mysticism/Daoism than that of formal Buddhism.’ Does he?).

A moving, empathetic book, which resonates with the modern search for self-awareness and ‘enlightenment’. It’s a subtle subversion of Buddhism, in favour of a native romanticism. Siddartha experiences the dao/ flow of life by the river, rather than in the structure of classical Buddhism.

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[2] The Road (Cormac McCarthy, Picador, September 2006).

‘There is no God and we are his prophets’ (p. 143).

Move over, John Updike. Cormac McCarthy is being hailed as America’s hottest contemporary prose-writer. (Harold Bloom says McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is ‘the major esthetic achievement of any living American writer.’)

The Road is a haunting apocalyptic masterpiece, a frightening story of a man and his sickly son on a journey after a nuclear holocaust. The catastrophe had taken place years ago, just before the boy was born: ‘A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.’ Then: ‘People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road.’

The earth is grey and lifeless, and the protagonists’ chances of survival seem just as bleak. Father and son are given no names. There are no birds. Many sentences have no finite verbs; many words are bereft of their apostrophes. The book has no chapters, but is composed of several hundred isolated events and scraps of dialogue.

Typical: ‘The land was gullied and eroded and barren. The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes. Middens of anonymous trash. Farmhouses in the fields scoured of their paint and the clapboards spooned and sprung from the wallstuds. All of it shadowless and without feature. The road descended through a jungle of dead kudzu. A marsh where the dead reeds lay over the water. Beyond the edge of the fields the sullen haze hung over the earth and sky alike. By late afternoon it had begun to snow and they went on with the tarp over them and the wet snow hissing on the plastic.’

The man’s late wife – who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, and later killed herself – had said, ‘We’re the walking dead in a horror film.’ McCarthy raids his dictionary of synonyms to describe the deathly physical (and moral) landscape.

There is no plot, except to stay alive and hopeful in a world that offers hardly any life or hope. (The man’s revolver is loaded with his last two bullets…) Each day they scavenge for food, and experience freezing cold…

On their way to the coast and survival and a rumored community of decency, these two ‘good guys’ are in constant danger from roaming bands of cannibalistic thugs. What do good guys do? ‘They keep trying. They dont give up.’

The book’s main themes are the father’s fiercely protective (redemptive?)

love for his son, his desperate impulse to keep the boy alive, and also the boy’s instinctive altruism which has to be tempered for the sake of their survival by the father’s fierce amorality. And behind all that: how much can you subtract from human existence before it ceases to be human?

This ‘Dantean tour of hell that would make Dante himself shudder’ as one commentator puts it drags us into places we don’t want to go, forces us to think about questions we don’t want to ask.

The neo-Biblical black rhetoric of a world gone horribly wrong (Ezekiel’s apocalyptic vision of a valley of dry bones comes to mind) is unrelieved until the last page or two, after the father dies and the grieving boy is found by another family. The climax is an uncharacteristic (for McCarthy)

affirmation of faith and hope…

Here’s the penultimate paragraph, which you can exegete as you wish (p. 241): ‘The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was alright. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.’

Rowland Croucher

November 2006