Two lonely figures traverse a ruined, anarchic, desolate America where few survivors remain after a cataclysmic event that causes the cities to burn and turns the air into ash. A father and his young son are travelling on foot, scavenging food and with only a pistol as protection, they try desperately to reach the coast – yet what awaits them there, sanctuary or further danger?
Transcript
Episode aired 1st May 2007
Presenter: Jennifer Byrne
Panellists: Betty Churcher, Peter Goldsworthy, Marieke Hardy, Jason Steger
Jennifer: Hello, I’m Jennifer Byrne and welcome to the First Tuesday Book Club. Our books tonight are by two giants of American literature, both of whom, although we didn’t know it when we chose the books, have been very much in the news this past month; one has just won the Pulitzer Fiction Prize, the other, a much loved and sadly recently departed humanist and humorist who’s been described as literatures wise and eccentric uncle, so stay with us and let’s meet the team; Jason Steger is Books Editor of The Age Newspaper, a man for whom too much reading is never enough, lovely to have you back
Jason: Thank you.
Jennifer: Peter Goldsworthy writes poetry, short stories, opera and novels including Maestro, Honk If You’re Jesus and Three Dog Night, what are you working on at the moment Peter?
Peter: We’re supposed to be superstitious aren’t we, writers or is that?
Jennifer: Well, unless it’s Macbeth, you can speak
Peter: Just finally at the end of a novel after several years but also I’ve been doing another stage adaptation of an earlier novel working with my daughter at a State Theatre in South Australia and I enjoyed it so much
Jennifer: Working with your daughter or the stage?
Peter: No, working on the stage for the first time, a steep learning curve but great fun
Jennifer: Welcome to the Club. Betty Churcher is an art critic and historian, author, gallery director and presenter of many acclaimed television programs, including the current Hidden Treasures. Betty, with that sort of background, are you mainly a non-fiction or a fiction reader?
Betty: Non-fiction really Jennifer but I must say I love it when I am obliged to read fiction as I was when you invited me here and I thoroughly enjoyed it
Jennifer: So you’ve done your lessons?
Betty: I’ve done my lessons and with great joy I might say.
Jennifer: Well we’re very pleased you could come and join us and of course, welcome also to our regular mistress of the internet, Marieke Hardy,
Marieke: Hi.
Jennifer: To the books, and first up, the story of a journey by a man and his young son, two of the last people on earth, through the incinerated waste-land that once was America, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning, The Road.
[Tape insert]
Jennifer: Well not a cheery book but a mighty work, Jason, how did you travel on the road?
Jason: Oh look you’re right, it’s not a cheery work, it’s ghastly but it’s absolutely brilliant as well and if people haven’t read it will have huge impact I think, it certainly had a big impact on me.
Jennifer: I must admit, we thought long and hard actually before bringing it to the Club because I love it beyond telling but it is a dark thing to ask people to read, just a quick reaction from all of you; Peter?
Peter: An extraordinary book, one of the best novels I’ve read in many years. Initially it’s sort of Hemmingway pastiche in a way, it almost deterred me but then you just go with the poetic flow of that and it’s so imagined that is a wonderful, inexorably logical book once he sets up those parameters.
Betty: I thought it was a marvellous book. I felt at the end I’d just experience a great work of art, I felt almost like Brancusi’s Endless Column, you know, each segment perfect in itself, it goes on and on and on, it has to stop because everything does but it stays in your memory as a single, wonderful column of experience.
Marieke: Yes very harrowing, it’s not a book that you can say it’s a pleasure to read, I didn’t find it a pleasure to read which raises that interesting thing that it may be a work of brilliance but I never want to read it again.
Jennifer: It’s not hard to read physically, just emotionally
Peter: But it’s the logic of the narrative I think, it has those two wonderful and paradoxical ingredients, on the one hand it keeps surprising you but each surprise you realise inexorably had to happen, that’s the great logic of great narratives, that they have the surprise plus the inevitability, somehow fused and I’m not sure how they play off each other in time in the readers mind but they do
Betty: And one of the interesting things I found was that the father, seemed to stand for that bit of man-kind that knows you must go on, the boy was the, if you like, the humanitarian side of man-kind, he was the one who was worried about the little boy that he saw, remember?
Marieke: And was always asking why as well
Jason: And the man who was struck by lightening
Jennifer: These various characters who are met on the way
Betty: Yes, he said; let’s stop; no the father said; we must go
Jennifer: And that beautiful line when the boy looks back, weeping to the one they’ve left behind, the lost boy and McCarthy has the lost boy glowing like a tabernacle, it’s so deeply …
Betty: I worried about that child right the way through like the little boy did
Jennifer: That is what, to me, what the book is about, it’s such a reductive thing to say but it seemed to be about how humans respond when all hope is gone, I mean, the question seems to be actually; when there is no hope, when there is no escape, what do you do? And this book in a sense is the answer to that
Marieke: And it seemed all that was left after that was the bond between a father and a son, it was a parent and child, that was the hope, that was it, that was all that was left
Jason: The fire, carrying the fire
Betty: I think it was keeping going, one step after another
Jennifer: But ever bit of logic said; actually the reason we’re saying ‘the man’, ‘the boy’, because they have no names, ‘the mother’ kills herself very early on in the book, if fact, it’s done by the time we meet them on the road and it’s the logical response in a way, and it’s not presented as a cowardly act but neither is it an heroic act, the heroism is their continuing
Peter: The interesting thing about ‘the man’, ‘the boy’, I was describing it earlier as an initiation story as well, the father is trying to initiate the son into survival law as they’re moving but he doesn’t, the child retains his innocence in the sense that you’re talking about which ah, it doesn’t fit the normal initiation story of stories that run through most human cultures, particularly hunter/gatherer cultures
Jason: But it’s also a great love story isn’t it? That love between the man has for his child,
Peter: It’s a wonderful love story
Jason: It’s fantastic
Peter: And the idea of sacrifice there that he would do anything for his child to survive
Jennifer: I would challenge you on whether he retains his innocence, I think he retains his goodness and I think what we see is actually in a sense he looses his innocence because in the beginning he wants to stop and help and everyone that they come upon, by the end, you know when the father takes all the clothes and good off a thief that’s been stolen from them and the man says to the boy who’s complaining and says; but we must not do this, to leave his without food and without clothing in the cold and he says; well we could have killed him and a few sentences later they boy says; but we did kill him, so the boy
Marieke: He stops picking up toys along the way as well, there’s small references to changes in his behaviour and when he doesn’t talk for a very long time, he throws the flute away, then when he just goes silent for a very long time when he’s processing the horrific things that he’s seen, I think there’s a definite, gradual decline of his innocence
Jennifer: Let’s talk a bit about the ending, so ending alert if you want to make a cup of tea, if your stomach’s still strong, the fascinating thing about the ending is that unlike so much of the other McCarthy work there is a glimmer of hope isn’t there? There is a promise of that maybe though the world is beyond repair; there is hope for the boy. Were you relieved to come across that or not?
Peter: Ultimately but I was a little disappointed because I thought it’s slightly sentimental but you are so caught up in the plight of the young boy and the father that you are relieved that the boy is gonna survive a bit longer, when we were talking about his preserved innocence, I actually think he does preserve his innocence and he’s
Jason: He’s trusting
Peter: Yeah, he’s very trusting and there it is right there, I don’t know if I should tell you how I thought the novel would or even perhaps should have ended
Jennifer: Say
Peter: Well I thought finally he was going to have to eat his father, his dead father, his father was going to die and that was what was going to
Betty: Can we finish this off here?!
Marieke: Yes, I don’t think I would have made it here
Peter: That seemed to be where the logic of it, I was talking earlier about the logic of the narrative seemed to be going
Jennifer: And you were disappointed when it didn’t happen?
Peter: Not disappointed but pleases so I think there are mixed emotions there of course Jason: At first I thought that it was ambiguous and I looked at it a second time and I thought that it wasn’t ambiguous, there is some optimism there, but in terms of the logic of it, I thought that the boy would have to use the lesson that his father taught him earlier on, you know, the father tells him how to kill himself and I thought that that might be the end
Jennifer: Rather than fall at the hands of the marauders?
Marieke: I thought it was a bit of a cop-out as well but I agree, thank God, thank God for the cop-out and then I was talking to Jason about it earlier and he said; well, are you sure that they were good guys, maybe they were just lying and I just said; shut up! Don’t say that! I don’t even want to think about it in that regard and it’s a terrible thought to put into your head but what if they were saying that were good guys
Jennifer: So the people who helped the boy at the end …
Jason: I’m sorry, he said it to me, I need to spread it around, I don’t want to be the only person carrying it around
Peter: I agree with Jason on that, that’s the 30% possibility
Betty: But being a pragmatist I have to say that even though he met up with the good guys, those good guys had nowhere to go; nothing was growing on earth, nothing will ever grow on earth again, you feel; where are they going?
Jennifer: I did say it was a slender glimmer
Betty: Slender
Jason: Yeah you have to hope it’s a natural disaster, it’s a 50 year cloud and that by the time the boy reaches 55, 60 he’ll be
Peter: No they’ve got some hydroponic gardens and hot water electricity, they’re alright, they’re find … he’s doing well I hear actually
Jennifer: How did you immerge from this book? You said Peter, you came out at 3 in the morning exhilarated
Peter: I would have been exhilarated if he’d eaten his dad or killed himself, I still would have been exhilarated, it’s such a wonderful trip, road trip, road movie
Jennifer: You’re aware of being in the presence of greatness aren’t you?
Peter: You are
Jennifer: I remember shutting it and actually I had tears streaming down my face, actually this is the first time I’ve managed to talk about it without crying so I’m doing really well and it’s a masterpiece and you don’t go around saying that, what about you?
Jason: Well once I’d blown my nose and wiped my eyes
Jennifer: You too?
Jason: Oh, absolutely, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to cry in this book, it’s a brilliant book, it’s fantastic
Betty: Well I was awed by its brilliance; I just felt I was looking at a great work of art
Jennifer: And Marieke, you just thought; thank God it’s over!
Marieke: I did a bit but I thinks that’s a very interesting and disturbing way to look at a novel, I mean, I’m glad when a root canal is over you know, I don’t know how I feel about being so relieved to finish a book, I find that profoundly disturbing really
Jennifer: So that is Cormac McCarty’s The Road, as you’ve heard, it’s a serious journey and for my money; it’s got the Pulitzer Prize, the next stop, The Nobel, it’s an amazing book.
Time for a quick on action at the website, last month you’ll remember we asked you to tell us which books you started but couldn’t get through. Now many of agreed with readers in the UK that James Joyce’s Ulysses is impenetrable, War and Peace is currently finding a use as a door stop in the home of Gyrandia, astonishingly to me anyway, Charlotte put down John Steinbeck’s East of Eden because she couldn’t take any more despair, Charlotte, note, I think I’d leave The Road, don’t go there, and Livingstone offers us a spine stiffening tale, she tried several times to get into Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, fall at an early hurdle, gritted her teeth, persevered and it’s now of her all-time favourites, that’s a tale for book lovers.
And a quick look at some of the new and intriguing books for your consideration. Michael Chabon, who won a Pulitzer himself for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, has released the Yiddish Policeman’s Union. The prolific Clive James offers us Cultural Amnesia, an encyclopaedia of essays about everyone he considers worth knowing about in the 20th century, and another ex-pat, Janette Turner Hospital has a new novel, Orpheus lost. Lastly, for crime lovers, Gabrielle Lord’s private investigator, Gemma Lincoln, returns in Shattered. We’ll list the titles on the website and if you’ve read any of them, or will in the next month, please let us know what you thought.
Author Profile
Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He now lives the life of a recluse in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he shuns all requests for interviews, appearances at bookshops or literary festivals. In one respect he’s a publisher’s nightmare, in another, he remains one of the most admired writers of recent times, his works referred to as masterpieces of American literature.
He is the third of six children (the eldest son). Originally named Charles (after his father) it was later changed to Cormac after the Irish King. Raised as an Irish Catholic, many critics see his style and prose resembling that of the bible.
McCarthy entered the University of Tennessee in 1951-1952 and was a liberal arts major. In 1953, he joined the US Air Force serving for four years, two of which saw him stationed in Alaska where he hosted a radio show. In 1957, he returned to the University of Tennessee where he published his first stories in the student literary magazine. He and his family then moved to Chicago, completing his first novel /The Orchard Keeper/ while apparently he also worked as a motor mechanic.
In 1966, he received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant allowing he and his wife to travel southern Europe. They settled for a while on the island of Ibiza, where McCarthy completed revisions of /Outer Dark,/ his next novel. After he returned to America /Outer Dark/ was published in 1968 to generally favourable reviews. The reviews for /The Orchard Keeper/ had also been good.
In 1979, McCarthy published his fourth novel, /Suttree./ This novel had occupied his writing life for some twenty years. Some critics still maintain that it is his finest novel. /All the Pretty Horses,/ the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published in 1992 and became a publishing sensation, enjoying excellent reviews and wide readership. It became a New York Times bestseller, and sold 190,000 copies in hardcover within the first six months of publication.
A 2006 New York Times poll asked many noted writers and critics what they thought were the most important works in American fiction in the last 25 years, McCarthy’s /Blood Meridian/ ranked #3 with his Border Trilogy receiving multiple votes.
It’s been reported that his favorite novel is /Moby-Dick,/ and he doesn’t like to talk about writing.
~~~
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
Summary/Excerpt
Two lonely figures traverse a ruined, anarchic, desolate America where few survivors remain after a cataclysmic event that causes the cities to burn and turns the air into ash. A father and his young son, trying to survive with only each other, hope to find sanctuary on the coast. Travelling on foot, wearing cotton masks to protect their lungs from the falling ash, scavenging food and with only a pistol as protection, they try desperately to evade the barbaric gangs who have arisen from the utter collapse of social order.
*EXCERPT from /The Road/*
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.
With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here.
When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep. He’d pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets. He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.
I’m right here.
I know.
An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to abandon the cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.
Two lonely figures traverse a ruined, anarchic, desolate America where few survivors remain after a cataclysmic event that causes the cities to burn and turns the air into ash. A father and his young son are travelling on foot, scavenging food and with only a pistol as protection, they try desperately to reach the coast – yet what awaits them there, sanctuary or further danger?
Transcript
Episode aired 1st May 2007
Presenter: Jennifer Byrne
Panellists: Betty Churcher, Peter Goldsworthy, Marieke Hardy, Jason Steger
Jennifer: Hello, I’m Jennifer Byrne and welcome to the First Tuesday Book Club. Our books tonight are by two giants of American literature, both of whom, although we didn’t know it when we chose the books, have been very much in the news this past month; one has just won the Pulitzer Fiction Prize, the other, a much loved and sadly recently departed humanist and humorist who’s been described as literatures wise and eccentric uncle, so stay with us and let’s meet the team; Jason Steger is Books Editor of The Age Newspaper, a man for whom too much reading is never enough, lovely to have you back
Jason: Thank you.
Jennifer: Peter Goldsworthy writes poetry, short stories, opera and novels including Maestro, Honk If You’re Jesus and Three Dog Night, what are you working on at the moment Peter?
Peter: We’re supposed to be superstitious aren’t we, writers or is that?
Jennifer: Well, unless it’s Macbeth, you can speak
Peter: Just finally at the end of a novel after several years but also I’ve been doing another stage adaptation of an earlier novel working with my daughter at a State Theatre in South Australia and I enjoyed it so much
Jennifer: Working with your daughter or the stage?
Peter: No, working on the stage for the first time, a steep learning curve but great fun
Jennifer: Welcome to the Club. Betty Churcher is an art critic and historian, author, gallery director and presenter of many acclaimed television programs, including the current Hidden Treasures. Betty, with that sort of background, are you mainly a non-fiction or a fiction reader?
Betty: Non-fiction really Jennifer but I must say I love it when I am obliged to read fiction as I was when you invited me here and I thoroughly enjoyed it
Jennifer: So you’ve done your lessons?
Betty: I’ve done my lessons and with great joy I might say.
Jennifer: Well we’re very pleased you could come and join us and of course, welcome also to our regular mistress of the internet, Marieke Hardy,
Marieke: Hi.
Jennifer: To the books, and first up, the story of a journey by a man and his young son, two of the last people on earth, through the incinerated waste-land that once was America, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning, The Road.
[Tape insert]
Jennifer: Well not a cheery book but a mighty work, Jason, how did you travel on the road?
Jason: Oh look you’re right, it’s not a cheery work, it’s ghastly but it’s absolutely brilliant as well and if people haven’t read it will have huge impact I think, it certainly had a big impact on me.
Jennifer: I must admit, we thought long and hard actually before bringing it to the Club because I love it beyond telling but it is a dark thing to ask people to read, just a quick reaction from all of you; Peter?
Peter: An extraordinary book, one of the best novels I’ve read in many years. Initially it’s sort of Hemmingway pastiche in a way, it almost deterred me but then you just go with the poetic flow of that and it’s so imagined that is a wonderful, inexorably logical book once he sets up those parameters.
Betty: I thought it was a marvellous book. I felt at the end I’d just experience a great work of art, I felt almost like Brancusi’s Endless Column, you know, each segment perfect in itself, it goes on and on and on, it has to stop because everything does but it stays in your memory as a single, wonderful column of experience.
Marieke: Yes very harrowing, it’s not a book that you can say it’s a pleasure to read, I didn’t find it a pleasure to read which raises that interesting thing that it may be a work of brilliance but I never want to read it again.
Jennifer: It’s not hard to read physically, just emotionally
Peter: But it’s the logic of the narrative I think, it has those two wonderful and paradoxical ingredients, on the one hand it keeps surprising you but each surprise you realise inexorably had to happen, that’s the great logic of great narratives, that they have the surprise plus the inevitability, somehow fused and I’m not sure how they play off each other in time in the readers mind but they do
Betty: And one of the interesting things I found was that the father, seemed to stand for that bit of man-kind that knows you must go on, the boy was the, if you like, the humanitarian side of man-kind, he was the one who was worried about the little boy that he saw, remember?
Marieke: And was always asking why as well
Jason: And the man who was struck by lightening
Jennifer: These various characters who are met on the way
Betty: Yes, he said; let’s stop; no the father said; we must go
Jennifer: And that beautiful line when the boy looks back, weeping to the one they’ve left behind, the lost boy and McCarthy has the lost boy glowing like a tabernacle, it’s so deeply …
Betty: I worried about that child right the way through like the little boy did
Jennifer: That is what, to me, what the book is about, it’s such a reductive thing to say but it seemed to be about how humans respond when all hope is gone, I mean, the question seems to be actually; when there is no hope, when there is no escape, what do you do? And this book in a sense is the answer to that
Marieke: And it seemed all that was left after that was the bond between a father and a son, it was a parent and child, that was the hope, that was it, that was all that was left
Jason: The fire, carrying the fire
Betty: I think it was keeping going, one step after another
Jennifer: But ever bit of logic said; actually the reason we’re saying ‘the man’, ‘the boy’, because they have no names, ‘the mother’ kills herself very early on in the book, if fact, it’s done by the time we meet them on the road and it’s the logical response in a way, and it’s not presented as a cowardly act but neither is it an heroic act, the heroism is their continuing
Peter: The interesting thing about ‘the man’, ‘the boy’, I was describing it earlier as an initiation story as well, the father is trying to initiate the son into survival law as they’re moving but he doesn’t, the child retains his innocence in the sense that you’re talking about which ah, it doesn’t fit the normal initiation story of stories that run through most human cultures, particularly hunter/gatherer cultures
Jason: But it’s also a great love story isn’t it? That love between the man has for his child,
Peter: It’s a wonderful love story
Jason: It’s fantastic
Peter: And the idea of sacrifice there that he would do anything for his child to survive
Jennifer: I would challenge you on whether he retains his innocence, I think he retains his goodness and I think what we see is actually in a sense he looses his innocence because in the beginning he wants to stop and help and everyone that they come upon, by the end, you know when the father takes all the clothes and good off a thief that’s been stolen from them and the man says to the boy who’s complaining and says; but we must not do this, to leave his without food and without clothing in the cold and he says; well we could have killed him and a few sentences later they boy says; but we did kill him, so the boy
Marieke: He stops picking up toys along the way as well, there’s small references to changes in his behaviour and when he doesn’t talk for a very long time, he throws the flute away, then when he just goes silent for a very long time when he’s processing the horrific things that he’s seen, I think there’s a definite, gradual decline of his innocence
Jennifer: Let’s talk a bit about the ending, so ending alert if you want to make a cup of tea, if your stomach’s still strong, the fascinating thing about the ending is that unlike so much of the other McCarthy work there is a glimmer of hope isn’t there? There is a promise of that maybe though the world is beyond repair; there is hope for the boy. Were you relieved to come across that or not?
Peter: Ultimately but I was a little disappointed because I thought it’s slightly sentimental but you are so caught up in the plight of the young boy and the father that you are relieved that the boy is gonna survive a bit longer, when we were talking about his preserved innocence, I actually think he does preserve his innocence and he’s
Jason: He’s trusting
Peter: Yeah, he’s very trusting and there it is right there, I don’t know if I should tell you how I thought the novel would or even perhaps should have ended
Jennifer: Say
Peter: Well I thought finally he was going to have to eat his father, his dead father, his father was going to die and that was what was going to
Betty: Can we finish this off here?!
Marieke: Yes, I don’t think I would have made it here
Peter: That seemed to be where the logic of it, I was talking earlier about the logic of the narrative seemed to be going
Jennifer: And you were disappointed when it didn’t happen?
Peter: Not disappointed but pleases so I think there are mixed emotions there of course Jason: At first I thought that it was ambiguous and I looked at it a second time and I thought that it wasn’t ambiguous, there is some optimism there, but in terms of the logic of it, I thought that the boy would have to use the lesson that his father taught him earlier on, you know, the father tells him how to kill himself and I thought that that might be the end
Jennifer: Rather than fall at the hands of the marauders?
Marieke: I thought it was a bit of a cop-out as well but I agree, thank God, thank God for the cop-out and then I was talking to Jason about it earlier and he said; well, are you sure that they were good guys, maybe they were just lying and I just said; shut up! Don’t say that! I don’t even want to think about it in that regard and it’s a terrible thought to put into your head but what if they were saying that were good guys
Jennifer: So the people who helped the boy at the end …
Jason: I’m sorry, he said it to me, I need to spread it around, I don’t want to be the only person carrying it around
Peter: I agree with Jason on that, that’s the 30% possibility
Betty: But being a pragmatist I have to say that even though he met up with the good guys, those good guys had nowhere to go; nothing was growing on earth, nothing will ever grow on earth again, you feel; where are they going?
Jennifer: I did say it was a slender glimmer
Betty: Slender
Jason: Yeah you have to hope it’s a natural disaster, it’s a 50 year cloud and that by the time the boy reaches 55, 60 he’ll be
Peter: No they’ve got some hydroponic gardens and hot water electricity, they’re alright, they’re find … he’s doing well I hear actually
Jennifer: How did you immerge from this book? You said Peter, you came out at 3 in the morning exhilarated
Peter: I would have been exhilarated if he’d eaten his dad or killed himself, I still would have been exhilarated, it’s such a wonderful trip, road trip, road movie
Jennifer: You’re aware of being in the presence of greatness aren’t you?
Peter: You are
Jennifer: I remember shutting it and actually I had tears streaming down my face, actually this is the first time I’ve managed to talk about it without crying so I’m doing really well and it’s a masterpiece and you don’t go around saying that, what about you?
Jason: Well once I’d blown my nose and wiped my eyes
Jennifer: You too?
Jason: Oh, absolutely, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to cry in this book, it’s a brilliant book, it’s fantastic
Betty: Well I was awed by its brilliance; I just felt I was looking at a great work of art
Jennifer: And Marieke, you just thought; thank God it’s over!
Marieke: I did a bit but I thinks that’s a very interesting and disturbing way to look at a novel, I mean, I’m glad when a root canal is over you know, I don’t know how I feel about being so relieved to finish a book, I find that profoundly disturbing really
Jennifer: So that is Cormac McCarty’s The Road, as you’ve heard, it’s a serious journey and for my money; it’s got the Pulitzer Prize, the next stop, The Nobel, it’s an amazing book.
Time for a quick on action at the website, last month you’ll remember we asked you to tell us which books you started but couldn’t get through. Now many of agreed with readers in the UK that James Joyce’s Ulysses is impenetrable, War and Peace is currently finding a use as a door stop in the home of Gyrandia, astonishingly to me anyway, Charlotte put down John Steinbeck’s East of Eden because she couldn’t take any more despair, Charlotte, note, I think I’d leave The Road, don’t go there, and Livingstone offers us a spine stiffening tale, she tried several times to get into Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, fall at an early hurdle, gritted her teeth, persevered and it’s now of her all-time favourites, that’s a tale for book lovers.
And a quick look at some of the new and intriguing books for your consideration. Michael Chabon, who won a Pulitzer himself for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, has released the Yiddish Policeman’s Union. The prolific Clive James offers us Cultural Amnesia, an encyclopaedia of essays about everyone he considers worth knowing about in the 20th century, and another ex-pat, Janette Turner Hospital has a new novel, Orpheus lost. Lastly, for crime lovers, Gabrielle Lord’s private investigator, Gemma Lincoln, returns in Shattered. We’ll list the titles on the website and if you’ve read any of them, or will in the next month, please let us know what you thought.
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