Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Edward P. Jones – The Known World

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The first chapter of Edward P. Jones’ novel The Known World opens with Moses, the overseer slave for a black slaveowner, tasting the soil he has just worked for 15 hours and then walking out into the small patch of forest beyond his cabin but still on his master’s land. In these first few beautifully written pages Jones create the rich and paradoxal world of Henry Townsend’s plantation. From Alice, a brain-injured night-wanderer to Caldonia, Henry’s wife, to Elias, another slave and many more, the personalities on this both unique and typical southern plantation come alive, setting out the threads of a perplexing and haunting story that once woven together will extend far beyond the boundaries of the fields and the house. 

While reading the novel, I was reminded of an interview I once listened to on NPR with Romeo Dallaire, who was commander of the United Nations peacekeeping forces during the Rwandan genocide and who wrote the book: Shake Hands with the Devil. In the interview, Dallaire spoke of the time he saw a woman, carrying a baby and wielding a machete, chasing another woman who was also carrying an infant. More than the horror of this image, Dallaire couldn’t get over the symbolic nature of the moment and what it spoke about the process of dehumanization. In The Known World, Jones takes on this same appalling idea by telling the story of one of slavery’s lesser known legacies – free black persons owning their own slaves.  

I call it a legacy because its very possibility stems from the moral corrosion created by the institution of slavery. Jones eloquently investigates the soul-destroying ethical compromise of granting yourself the right of power over another human being, allowing life and liberty to be considered property. Accepting slavery as ‘correct’ and ‘right’ relies upon an incredibly powerful process of dehumanization. Jones shows exactly how powerful this process was and how easily it was accepted by the white community but, more importantly, how it filtered down into the black community as well. 

Although the book tells a myriad of stories, about each of the slaves and what happens to them, the novel is mainly concerned with tracing the development of Henry’s plantation and his relationship with his parents and his former master as well as the chaos, confusion and disappointment that ensues upon his unexpected death. With the care of a historian and the prowess of an incredible writer, Jones dissects this tiny universe and exposes the essential fact of its tragedy.

short fiction – Nadine Gordimer

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I thought I might start something new here at Logophilia and see if I can’t make it into a bit of a tradition, or at least a regularly recurring piece. What I’d like to instate is a weekly short fiction review. I read a considerable number of short pieces per month but never force myself to think too much about them afterward. But I’m keen to change that and spend some more time exploring short fiction.  

I have mentioned before that Nadine Gordimer is one of my all-time favorite authors and she will do quite nicely for this first installment. Gordimer is a South African writer and remains true to her roots, examining the intricacies of her culture and its painful past. She creates unique situations, fraught with dilemma and hampered by personal weakness. I come away from her fiction feeling that I’ve just faced up to some terribly difficult decision or confronted a human failing. Her characters surprise and astound me but never leave me behind, something that a lot of other ‘difficult’ fiction does. In that sense, I consider her a writer concerned with humanity in a larger sense even if her fiction centers almost completely on South Africa. 

A few months back I found a collection of Gordimer’s stories in my local 2nd hand bookshop called Six Feet of the Country. Having only read her novels until now, I snatched it up quickly. The title story concerns a single event in the lives of a recently transplanted urban couple on their farm just outside Johannesburg. One night, the husband (also the narrator) is called to their servants’ quarters under the ruse that one of the servant children are sick. What he finds is the dead body of a young man. It turns out the young man is the brother of one of the workers but an illegal immigrant from Pretoria who took sick along the perilous journey to find his way to what he hoped would be a better life. While the actual story couldn’t be simpler, Gordimer cleverly infuses its barebones plot with historical/cultural significance and the mournful notes of marital discord: 

When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension’, they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a black man won’t stand aside for a white man. 

I got up awkwardly as she watched me – how is it I always feel a fool when I have deserted her bed? After all, I know from the way she looks at me when she talks to me at breakfast next day that she is hurt and humiliated at my not wanting her – and I went out, clumsy with sleep. 

As the story continues, the reader begins to realize just what this narrator is really about. We read on – wary, appalled, and transfixed – as he deals with the death as well as his wife’s reaction to it and then struggles with his responsibility to act on behalf of his workers when they must confront the South African bureaucracy to arrange a proper burial for the young man.  Amazingly, Gordimer gets right inside this white man’s persona and manages, in just a few short pages, to slice apartheid South Africa open and expose its lopsided workings.

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Rachel Cusk – Arlington Park

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Rachel Cusk’s 2006 novel Arlington Park begs the question: Are all suburban women profoundly unhappy with their lives as wives and mothers? The emotional landscapes of the five women Cusk selects to follow about are a raucous mixture of bitter, enraged, depressed and perplexed. They are overwhelmingly frustrated with their roles as housewives, revolted at the perception of themselves as slaves to their children and keenly aware of a separation from their true inner identity.  

In the bathroom Maisie looked in the mirror. I am thirty-eight, she thought. I am Maisie at thirty-eight. This did not seem to be the same thing as saying, this is Clara at six, this is Elsie at four, which she did far more often. She did not know whether anyone had ever crystallized her. It seemed just then a terrible thing not to know: to have to guess at, and to conclude from something unclaimed in her face, something unauthored and anonymous, that the answer was no. She could have been anything she wanted to be: that was the spirit in which she might have taken her parents’ limited and discriminatory love, rather than being left by it to wonder what she actually was.  

Cusk’s 2004 novel The Lucky Ones (my review here) dealt with very similar issues – the possible transformation of the individual after marriage and parenthood. In that novel, the exploration of this idea seemed balanced and fair, carefully wrought and creatively considered and it determined a wide range of possible and believable resolutions. While The Lucky Ones hugged a broad cross-section of socio-economic life and posed more questions than it answered, Arlington Park deals specifically with wealthy suburbia and seems to offer a single unhappy vision as a final answer. 

The husbands in Arlington Park are a gallimaufry of righteous machismo, perplexed insensitivity and concerned helplessness. They are not at all partners to their wives. In Cusk’s vision, the suburban lifestyle creates couples who do not communicate and whose alien universes only come together for procreation, the exchange of money and frequently unkind conversation. Some readers might question the believability of this rigid and dismal situation. Is it really that awful? Do ALL suburban women feel this way? Hasn’t anyone figured out how to successfully marry their individual passions with family demands?  

Even the rare moments when a few of the women attempt to affirm their maternal or conjugal positions, they end up sounding emphatic, too shrill and even neurotic, like they are trying to convince themselves that the horrifying disaster they just perceived as their life is really nothing but a small hiccup in an elegant and rewarding existence. And then they throw their daughter’s lunchbox against the wall. 

In many ways, the thematic project of the novel seems to work against its meaningfulness. The incredible self-awareness of each of the women runs directly contrary to the idea that they’ve allowed themselves to accept or be tricked into such unfulfilling lives. So then, is it society’s fault? The smug anesthetization of suburbia? The evil male? Unless we are supposed to laugh at these women (a rather horrifying idea), the novel reads like a vigorous scolding. You silly women, why did you give up your jobs? Why on earth did you fall in love? Who told you having children would be easy? Motherhood, life and marriage – suburban setting or no – are all much more nuanced than the inflexible and polarized war that Arlington Park presents.  

However, something that Arlington Park does provide are wonderful, startling moments of distilled emotion. Cusk is remarkably skilled at using her prose to explode a single moment into a vast offering of experience and feeling, as exampled below by pregnant Solly’s middle-of-the-night thoughts: 

In the strange, whirling, light-cluttered realm of her body she felt only an immense confusion. She felt she contained everything, all good and evil, every possibility, everything in the world all jumbled together, shaken up like the sea by a storm so that nothing was clear and separate; it was all opaque, nauseating, full of litter and rubbish. She burned to expel from her this great, mounting force of debris, to clarify herself.  

Cusk writes with a rich and textured prose, filled with unique images and sharp dialogue. She writes confidently and vividly. Despite any frustration with the project of this particular novel, her writing is a pure pleasure to get lost in.  

David Guterson – Snow Falling on Cedars

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David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is an intriguing mix of literary finesse and shrewd plot-making. While it may not exactly qualify as genre-bending it does tend to push the limits of a reader’s boundaries. The opening chapter, filled with taut courtroom dialogue and jumpy fisherman ‘types’ seemed to run perpendicular to the breathtaking character portraits that followed it. This back and forth continued throughout the book, although it may be safe to assume that the more literary aspects of the novel remained dominant.  

The novel is set on the coast of an island in the Puget Sound in 1955 and follows the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, a local fisherman of Japanese origin who is under arrest for the murder of Carl Heine, another local fisherman. The murder is supposed to have been committed over a land dispute going back to before the war when Miyamoto’s family worked on the Heine family strawberry farm. 

The novel uses this ‘drama’ as a backdrop to explore racism, the complications of love and loss, and above all, the destructive capacities of war on an individual. The main male characters in the novel – Ishmael, Carl and Kabuo – share a certain grim understanding of what part of their soul they were asked to give away when they willingly went to war to fight for their country. All of them use the word murderer in their self-reflection, an idea that is only accentuated as Kabuo’s murder trial plays out. 

Guterson moves easily from one perspective to another, detailing the interior life of the many individuals that make up the small island community. Through these variegated lenses he manages to paint a faithful and engaging portrait of life as it may have been before and after WWII in a community that was home to a significant percentage of Japanese-Americans. All of whom were sent to the internment camps and who struggled with their bi-cultural identities.  

Kabuo’s wife, Hatsue, is the character Guterson uses to express most of this bi-cultural burden and the novel follows her life in exquisite detail. From her childhood working on the island’s strawberry farms, to her secret adolescent love affair with Ishmael Chambers, to her internment during the war and subsequent marriage to Kabuo. She is a remarkable character. Torn between her understanding of her own culture and her youthful love for Ishmael, she navigates a harsh course through the racial climate of pre-WWII America.  

Ishmael, for his part, returns from the war minus an arm but overloaded with a raft of bitterness. About losing Hatsue and, especially, about his understanding of how the war managed to transform him. He is a pivotal element of the novel, a man in possession of valuable information about the murder trial. His emotional struggle is one of the more poignant elements of the entire book. 

Overall, Guterson does manage to marry the considerable differences between the more sensational undercurrents of the story and its literary mood, creating a lovely piece of fiction with a lot to say about 1950’s America.

Carson McCullers – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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It is STILL raining here so the rainy day reads have continued in full swing. I finished Joanna Scott’s Tourmaline last night and will be gathering my thoughts for a post tomorrow or Wednesday. This was a lovely, ambitious book that gave me something to think about as well as an unfamiliar countryside to get lost in. 

But I wanted to write today about one of the books I finished last week – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. What a delight to discover this classic American writer! Before one of my book groups picked the book for our July read I’d never heard of McCullers, a fact I’m happy to remedy now that I see what an incredible writer she was.  

McCullers was born in 1917 and wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at the age of 22. She continued writing, despite several bouts of serious illness and depression, until her death of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 50. Her life story doesn’t read happily – young marriage and subsequent divorce, attempted suicide, a stroke at the age of 30, remarriage to her first husband who eventually kills himself, breast cancer, and continued poor health. Yet through all this she managed to write more than twenty short stories, six novels and a fair amount of poetry, most of which was published to critical acclaim during her lifetime.  

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter unravels somewhat like a walk through a gallery – the chapters read like somber portraits as the characters live their lonely lives beside one another but without the consolation of true interaction. The novel is set in a small southern town in Depression-era America, and follows five individuals as they search for something to take them above the daily bleakness of their lonesome existence. These five characters share only one thing – a painful appreciation of their own isolation.  

Biff Brannon – a man perplexed by what he sees occur around him: his wife’s death, the emotional excesses of his customers and acquaintances, the gentle love he begins to feel for the young girl Mick Kelly. Brannon moves through the novel like a man underwater but he is one of its more reflective elements coming up with thoughts such as: in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons – throw it to some human being or some human idea. 

Jake Blount – an intelligent but emotionally unstable man, broken by his understanding of society’s ills. He spends the entire novel fueling his alcoholic rage and ranting to anyone who will listen about the TRUTH he has discovered. 

Mick Kelly – ruling her neighborhood kingdom and her younger siblings with a ferocious tenderness. She wants nothing more than to spend her hours understanding the great wave of music that has risen up inside of her. She wants to take music lessons but her family is too poor. Instead she listens to the radio, absorbing the notes, unraveling the puzzle of it. The music was her – the real plain her…Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony and there was not enough of her to listen.  

Dr. Copeland – a black doctor and embittered man whose strictly envisioned hopes for his four children have turned up empty. He is proud and tireless, working long nights despite his advancing tuberculosis to heal and educate his community. To help them rise above their imposed poverty and moral decay. 

And finally, John Singer – a deaf-mute whose friend, another deaf-mute and the only person Singer can fully communicate with, gets sent to an asylum by a relative who no longer wishes to care for the increasingly difficult young man. Singer, alone and needing company, accepts the frequent intrusions of the community around him. He functions as the eye of the novel’s hurricane. The other characters rage and storm against their maddening life perceptions, finding comfort in Singer’s one-sided conversations. He listens to them. He offers them refreshment. He looks them in the eye. And slowly, Dr. Copeland, Jake, Mick and Biff, along with many others in the small town, begin to create a mythical being. A man with endless intelligence, infinite understanding, and vast compassion.  

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is about love. About need. About perception. It is also a faithful and painstakingly drawn portrait of America at its loneliest. McCullers’ exquisite prose is the perfect accompaniment to this often overcast landscape, fashioning a certain beauty into the anger and heartbreak of her characters. 

Keri Hulme – The Bone People

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Hulme’s eccentric novel is an unwieldy piece of fiction, as poetic and confusing as it is engaging, a demanding and messy story. Set in New Zealand in the 1980’s The Bone People tells the story of the unlikely friendship between three lost-and-hoping-to-be-found individuals: Kerewin – thirtysomething oddball loner, failed painter and precociously intelligent human; Joe – heartbroken drinker, honor-bound individual, failing father of 7 year-old Simon; Simon – angry and frightened child, intelligent imp and needy youngster who can’t speak.Essentially, the novel hinges on the fact that all three characters must learn to come to grips with the difficult ghosts of their past in order to accept the precious friendship that almost instantly blooms between them when Simon (a frequent truant) shows up one afternoon at Kerewin’s unconventional Tower-home on the beach and Joe must come to fetch him the next morning. The challenges to this friendship are immense. Both Joe and Kerewin are lonely, heartbroken individuals who drink enough alcohol to euthanize a small army and are more than willing to share it with Simon. Joe, while a loving father on the one hand, beats Simon to within an inch of his life every time the boy screws up by either stealing, cutting school or fighting. Kerewin, for her part, refuses to be touched, shunning all human contact and adopting a strict code of self-reliance. Despite Joe and Kerewin’s tragic pasts, only Simon’s difficult character traits seem to be really earned or understandable. He struggles with horrific memories, mostly suppressed we are led to believe, but that manifest in appalling nightmares. He is insecure and proud, tightly wound and often afraid.Simon’s mysterious shipwreck and unknown past wants to be the central story in the novel and it grows in significance from time to time when Kerewin attempts to investigate certain information or examine some of the boy’s psychological behaviors. But this story ultimately loses importance as the reader gets more involved in following Kerewin’s role in helping Joe deal with his abusive temper. Hulme would like the reader to find enough sympathy for Joe to support him through to the end of the book and its supposedly optimistic resolution but after all that happens this is asking quite a lot. So is asking us to believe in Simon’s unwavering devotion to a man that manages to knock out his teeth, create welts and ulcers on his back that refuse to heal and who eventually deafens him and most likely causes brain damage. No amount of poetic interior revelation can soften the blows of Joe’s monstrous behavior. Nor can it forgive Kerewin’s outright complicity with the final, nearly fatal beating.

Hulme takes both successful and unsuccessful risks with her prose. This is not a conventionally written novel but that is also not a reason to forgive many of the characters’ failings. Although there is a significant amount of elegant and lovely writing in The Bone People, the overall project didn’t seem coherent enough to save the difficult traps of the story.

Aristotle's Liberality

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I mentioned Aristotle’s ideas about taking the moderate position between two vices in my last post. Well one of the traits that he spends an exceptional amount of time on is Liberality. What he’s talking about here is our relationship with money and giving. This particular section was very interesting to me because I believe we live in an individualistic consumer culture and because all over the world (and just as often in our own backyards) we are confronted with staggering poverty and depressingly large gaps between the wealthy and the poor.At first I got quite frustrated because if he was writing about this very same issue over two thousand years ago and its clear we haven’t done much to resolve the matter, what does that mean about human evolution? We’re more civilized now? Ha!

All ranting aside, Aristotle has a pretty interesting view on the matter. He believes that wealth is simply a thing that can be used, a bit like a tool, and someone who makes the best use of their wealth is the most virtuous. And he outlines pretty clear rules about giving and receiving from the right people as well as not giving and not receiving from the wrong people.

Nor will he accept money from a wrong source; because such acceptance is inconsistent with indifference to money.

His main point centers on this idea of indifference. Money is a fine thing to have simply because it’s a tool. But too much pleasure in having money makes us lose our indifference to it and so we will experience pain when we have to give it away and therefore give less. And Aristotle’s view is that we should give.

But he will accept money from the right source, e.g. from his own property; not because it is a fine thing to do so, but because it is necessary so that he may have something to give.It is not easy for a liberal man to be rich, since he is neither acquisitive nor retentive of money, but is ready to part with it, and does not value it for itself, but only with a view to giving.

I love the notion of moderation coupled with responsibility here. He’s not saying that people should shed their homes and their clothes and go traipsing over the wilderness doing good deeds. He is reminding us that as social creatures we have a certain responsibility to take care of ourselves and make sure we have extra to give to people who haven’t reached the same level of virtue. This reminds me of Plato talking about how gains in intellectual and political wisdom come with a responsibility to go back and work with those who haven’t gotten there yet. I don’t think there is anything condescending in these ideas, not at all. What I find in both is real social compassion.

And he has a funny little insight into the perversity of human nature. He recognizes that there is a back door shortcut to this virtue. The difference between not taking and giving. It is wrong to take so of course we shouldn’t take from others for our benefit. Aristotle reminds us that this is a lot easier to do than giving, and probably what most law-abiding citizens concern themselves with. But it’s harder to give up what is our own and therefore more virtuous. And he rather darkly admits that illiberality (or stinginess) is more deeply rooted in human nature.

He also rightly points out that giving is all proportional. A poor person can give a small amount and come out more virtuous than a rich person giving a huge amount – it all depends on how much of our wealth we’re willing to part with.

In one of my scribbled notes for this section, I wrote a question about capitalism and whether Aristotle would consider it an inherently unethical activity. I suppose it would depend on how profits are used and re-distributed. I can say for sure that he was opposed to making money out of money – money lending with high rates of interest. To him, this wasn’t ethical because it removes the practical aspect out of money (money for exchange of goods and/or services) as well as encourages others to live beyond their means (prodigality).

All in all, Ethics was a great read. I may still have more to post but I’ll see what strikes me first. I’d love to get started on Politics right away but I’m up to my ears in a lot of other books at the moment, and really enjoying all of them. I mentioned Gargantua et Pantagruel last week and I am still cackling my way through it. I’ve also gotten halfway through Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and am rather engrossed in the story, even if it’s a difficult one to read. And I started Michel de Montaigne’s first volume of Essais, as if I didn’t have enough to read already!

Anne Bragance – Casus Belli

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Casus Belli – acts of war. A fitting title for a surprisingly dark novel about the psychological damage of conditional love. From the outside, the Douhet family seems normal. Good-looking intellectual father, capable and put-together mother, one lovely daughter and a charming son. But beneath the surface of this attractive family lies some very savage undercurrents.Claire Douhet, the mother, wields the weapons in this war. She is the only character given her own voice and through her self-righteous monologues with God, she reveals an unfeeling and envious interior life. Her daughter Virginie bears the brunt of Claire’s bitterness and she retaliates, first pathetically and after, destructively. The day her younger brother Christophe is born, five year-old Virginie adopts a limp she will keep for the rest of her life. She refuses her real name and selects Camille (a name with the same first letter as both of her parents and her younger brother), a request her mother refuses to honor. Stubbornly, Virginie keeps both, constructing a self-damaging alter-ego. And finally, when her brother is two or three months old, she throws him in the garbage can.

This act remains between Virginie and the mother as a sort of unexploded bomb. Claire does not reprimand her daughter. Instead she refuses to acknowledge what has happened, wrapping the moment up in a form of suffocating horror that alters Virginie’s self-perception forever. Virginie, too young to understand what she has done, is never given the opportunity to apologize and this stunted guilt sets up house in her psyche. Bragance commits a lovely passage to this idea of withheld forgiveness.

Dans les rivières, là-bas, au fond du monde, dans les mines profondes, des hommes cherchent l’or. Ils cherchent sous un soleil qui tue, le corps éreinté, courbé, poisseux d’une sueur chaude qui leur brûle les yeux, des années durant ils cherchent comme des diables fourbus, comme des demi-dieux impécunieux, ils s’acharnent à cette quête. Mais comment trouver l’or où il se trouve?

Dans sa maison, ici, bordée à droite comme à gauche de fusains bien taillés, précédée d’une pelouse bien tondue, Virginie cherche le pardon. S’il le faut, elle y passera sa vie, elle s’acharnera elle aussi, elle se l’est promise. Comme les chercheurs d’or de là-bas, si loin. Mais comment trouver le pardon quand l’offensée s’obstine à nier l’offense ? Comment obtenir le pardon quand la victime, trop innocente, ignore qu’il y a eu crime.

Pourtant, il faut de l’or pour survivre, l’or d’un regard, d’un geste, d’une parole, il faut le pardon, absolument.

[In the far away rivers at the end of the world, in the deepest mines, men hunt for treasure. They hunt beneath a killing sun, with wasted and bent bodies, dripping with a sticky sweat that stings their eyes. For years and years, they hunt like worn out devils, penniless demi-gods, relentless in their quest. But how to find this hidden treasure?

From within her house, just here, with its border of well-trimmed hedges and its perfectly mowed lawn, Virginie is hunting for forgiveness. If necessary, she will keep looking for the rest of her life, she’ll never give up, she’s promised herself. Like those very treasure seekers so far away. But how to find forgiveness when the injured party keeps denying the injury? How to be forgiven when the still too innocent victim doesn’t even know there was a crime?

Yet one needs treasure to survive, the treasure of a look, a gesture, a word, one needs forgiveness, for certain.]

The years pass, all tainted by the destructive ghost of this event. Virginie, unloved and so unable to love, marries, divorces, marries again, divorces again. She refuses to have children, denying herself a certain pleasure in the sheer desire to thwart her mother. Christophe marries but his mother can’t stand the woman he’s selected as she is too similar to his sister. It’s very ugly, the way Claire’s jealousy deforms what should be the most natural of relationships. Like Virginie’s body remains misshapen, so does the Douhet family dynamic. Made all the more tragic by the complicit silence of the father and the nearly blind cheerfulness of Christophe.

Casus Belli is not all doom and gloom, there are moments of redemption within the story even if they come too late to avoid the final disastrous event. This slim little book is literally exploding with thorny questions and uncomfortable propositions – not all of which get answered or fully addressed before its conclusion. A small disappointment in an otherwise rewarding read.

Cormac McCarthy – The Road

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Where do I even begin? With the writing…The prose in The Road has a rhythm, a cadence, a measured finality. A weight. Sentences, like the fictional world they describe, are stripped away to their rawest state. There are no wasted adjectives, no superfluous descriptions. Which is good, because any overzealous sketching of the horrors that McCarthy has imagined would only serve to vulgarize them. There is an incredible amount of restraint in this prose, and a resulting tension running below the surface of each sentence and every paragraph. And then just at the right time, the restraint eases off and the lines abandon themselves to a nearly reckless emotion.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

What will I remember? The images, the impressions…

The universe of The Road is not a comfortable place to get lost in – monochromatic, scentless, dirty, scarred. The overall impression is one of darkness, both physical and psychic. Humanity has been stripped of its unifying bonds, nature tortured to death, beauty become irrelevant.

Yet this barren landscape serves to underscore the pure beauty of the relationship between the father and his son. They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.

What are my questions? With the conflict…

The real conflict in the novel is not played out between the father-son team against the roving cannibals or even against time, although these two challenges are what give the story its forward propulsion, the real conflict lies between the father and the son as they negotiate their disparate visions of existence. Fear, benevolence, compassion, sapience, rage – how much of each is needed for survival? What is “good” behavior and why is it still important in this new world? What does the future mean to each of them?

A thoroughly disturbing but courageous piece of fiction.