On The Road

    Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a sparse post-apocalyptic allegory that give the reader little in direct opinions or ease interpretations, instead relying on the reader to supply his or own meanings to the many haunting and strange images provided.  Yet, it seems to be the more subtle moments where the most is left unsaid, left to wide personal interpretation.  The terse conversations give us minimal insight into the character's moods and inner workings, especially the boy whose point of view we are rarely ever provided.
     Particularly vexing to me is a scene that begins on page 25 in which the pair arrives at the man's childhood home.  The man seems excited and anxious to explore the interior of the house, but the boy's immediate reaction is fear.  When the man asks, "Don't you want to see where I used to live?" the boy's simple response is NO.  He is afraid of finding anyone inside, a fear that is lost on the man.  This is a rare moment to see the man so quick to rush into danger when throughout the novel he is commonly urging caution.  Perhaps we could simply attribute this to him being blinded by his enthusiasm, but this also seems to be a somewhat out of character moment for the boy.
     While the boy grows more cautious and weary of leaving the road as the novel proceeds and the dangers around them seem to multiply, such an instantaneous visceral reaction at this stage in their journey to something so seemingly benign strikes me as odd.  Throughout the story, the man tells the boy numerous stories about the old world, and they share nostalgic moments with relics from the past, everything from a Coke to a flaregun, but the boy never shies away from these icons of the dead world.  Perhaps these are too harmless to cause a reaction, but when confronted with something that holds real elements of the past, real history (his father's history, in this case) the boy responses quickly and negatively.
     And the responses of the boy and the man to what they encounter on their journey only grow further apart from there.  We are reminded again and again that the man's world and the boy's world, the one he will grow up and survive in, are very different places.  The old world, the one, that no matter the cause, populated the countryside with savage cultists and cannibals, is as alien to the boy as this one is to the father.  There is hope there, I feel, that the boy and others like him, those that are born into this world and will live there for years to come, will not repeat the mistakes of their predecessors, will be at peace with their world and learn to survive within it.

Choices, Choices

I've been spending some time this weekend looking over the four books available for our reading group assignment, and I am surprised by how difficult this decision will be!  First, The Windup Girl is a novel that I've already read and really enjoyed.  The setting is one of the most well thought-out and realistic I have come across in science fiction in a long time (comparisons made to William Gibson's Neuromancer are well founded; another book worth checking out, by the way).  I know that there is plenty I can talk about and analyze here, but I'm also curious to check out the other three selections after investigating them further.

Uglies has an interesting premise that, like The Windup Girl, is very topical.  I've heard very good things, and enjoy the directness and lack of pretensions in YA novels.  The plot also sounds very similar to an old Twilight Zone episode I remember watching as a kid!  And I'm not the only one to notice the similarity (http://scottwesterfeld.com/blog/2008/01/number-12-looks-suspiciously-familiar/). 

Boneshaker is something that's been on my radar for a very long time thanks to Amazon.com recommendations, but has kept getting pushed down further on my reading list.  I love both steampunk and weird fiction, and the description reminds me a little of China Mieville.  This one's currently leading the pack for me!

Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America (quite a mouthful) is the one I know the least about coming into this course. I'm intrigued because it just sounds like such a fun read, but some of the mixed reviews are an area of concern. I think that New York is a very overused setting for fiction, and compared to such vivid locales as an overcrowded Thailand, a quarantined, zombie-infested, steampunk Seattle, and a world of forced beauty, this seems a little short on imagination. But then maybe this book has the greatest opportunity to surprise me. That's certainly worth considering...

There's a lot to think over here, but it looks like I win with all four choices.