The Road

Jack London's Road is a somewhat disjointed memoir of his hoboing days in 1894 when he hopped freights across the continent. America was crippled by one of its worst depressions ever, and he set out to join an army of the unemployed marching on Washington. Only 18 at the time, he went as more of a lark than anything else, and describes with youthful exuberance riding the rods and foiling brakemen by climbing to the roofs of, and jumping in and out of, moving boxcars.

When not on the train, he begged for food and clothes, which he looked upon as "a joyous prank, a game of wits, a nerve-exerciser." He spent 30 days for vagrancy in the Erie County Penitentiary outside Buffalo, and explains how he conned the other cons. He saw a woman being whipped, stole a brandnew hat off the head of a Chinaman, and ran with a gang of youths who rolled drunks.

Similarities between this and a more famous road book (an autobiographical novel by another Jack) invite comparisons, but my thoughts ran, or rather rambled, in another direction, and I found myself thinking about an entirely different sort of road novel.

Cormac McCarthy's Road runs through a post-apocalyptic America with a man and his young son carrying their meagre belongings in a shopping cart. The terrain is an "ashen scabland," the train they stumble across "slowly decomposing for all eternity." The few remaining people are broken-down wrecks living like animals –- a grinding filthy miserable existence fraught by growing fear and dread. "I don't think we're likely to meet any good guys on the road," the father tells his son.

Both books are short, London's clocking in at just over 50,000 words with McCarthy's in the same ballpark. London's prose remains surprisingly fresh a century after it was written, but in places its youthful vigour gives way to what sounds like adolescent boasting. Of his ability to fabricate a story at a moment's notice, he says, "I have often thought that to this training of my tramp days is due much of my success as a story-writer."

McCarthy's prose is far more grim and powerful. The stripped-down punctuation gives it an elemental quality suitable for such a tense and harrowing tale. London's own post-apocalyptic novel, The Scarlet Plague, seems positively sunny by comparison. Similar to McCarthy's Road, it begins with an old man and his twelve-year-old grandson plodding along a railway embankment and clad in skins. It is 60 years after a worldwide plague in 2013 (eerily, the same year I am writing this) killed off nearly everyone. The handful that remain live in "primitive savagery," collecting human teeth on strings and unable to count beyond ten. One of the survivors is a brutish chauffeur who takes pleasure in beating the widow of one of the most influential men in pre-plague times.

Brutality, atavism, and survival of the strongest are recurring motifs in London's work, but nothing in his oeuvre can compare to McCarthy's Road for the chilling evocation of how nasty and repellent life would really be in a world without the veneer of civilization. On the very first page of the novel is the following dream:

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 the 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.

London's chauffeur represents a brutal working class bent on revenge, whereas McCarthy's creature stands for a world inimical to everyone, with the man and the boy struggling to remain not only alive, but human. In the end, however, it seems to me that both authors are writing about the same thing -- the savagery of American society.

Canadian Content

In 1894 London returned from his wanderings via the CPR. It took him six days to get from Montreal to Ottawa. The latter, he says, is "the hardest town in the United States and Canada to beg clothes in; the one exception is Washington, D.C."

At a Winnipeg police station he pieced together a tale convincing enough to keep him out of jail. Travelling west, he engaged in a long battle of wits with the CPR's brakemen, which he finally won enabling him to ride over 1000 miles in a boxcar half full of coal.

In a later chapter, "Hobos That Pass in the Night," he provides more detail about the journey, describing how he and another "bo" were aware of each other's presence by their noms-de-rail (London's was Sailor Jack) which they carved in wooden watertanks as they went across the prairies and through Kicking Horse Pass in the Rockies. In Vancouver they both signed on ships without once ever meeting each other.

Despite London's experiences in Ottawa and Winnipeg, James Haley writes in his biography that "London was cheered by the discovery that Canadians were more forthcoming in their sympathy for the homeless unemployed" and that "Canadian generosity left a deep impression."

On the Rods

Haley referred to London's Road as "a combination memoir of his months riding the rails and exposition of tramping as a an American subculture created by capitalist abuse of workers."

Most of the material had appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine before it came out in book form. The magazine version contained a number of illustrations not found in the book, but you can find them on the excellent Jack London site maintained by the Sonoma State University Library. The book itself was a flop, unlike McCarthy's Road, which was famously a selection by Oprah's Bookclub, won the Pulitzer in 2006, and made into a movie.

McCarthy's Suttree is probably the closest of his works to London's Road, for it describes the ragged existence of people on the margins of society in Knoxville, Tennessee. Said to be semi-autobiographical, it's a wonderful book with powerful prose, and a good one to start with if you haven't read McCarthy before, because its darkness is leavened with humour.

Links

The Road with illustrations
Jack London's Dark Side An insightful essay about his "historical castration"

Cormac McCarthy official website
McCarthy's interview with Oprah

The Kraken Wakes

This classic SF novel was first published in 1953 and is still in print, a testimony to John Wyndham's ability to create pleasantly chilling scenarios. His calm, matter-of-fact tone is perfect for relating catastrophic events.

In this book, ETs have arrived on earth and taken up residence in the deepest parts of the ocean. Soon ships begin disappearing, then coastal raids take place. Finally the glaciers and ice-caps start melting. London floods and Parliament is forced to relocate. Compounding the problem are inept governments, misguided newspapers, and befuddled scientists.

Through it all a husband-and-wife team working for the English Broadcasting Company provide a sane and steady perspective, especially when society begins falling apart. Their breezy and intelligent conversation helps carry the book through the slow buildup to disaster.

Wyndham's books are the equivalent of cosy English murder mysteries, perfect for summer reading.

Links

1965 CBC radio adaptation (downloadable)
Kraken book sculpture
Kraken Rum

More Tales of a Ruined Earth

The Last Man by Mary Shelley 1826
The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel 1901
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart 1949
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham 1951
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank 1959
Davy by Edgar Pangborn 1964
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban 1980
The Postman by David Brin 1985
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood 2003
The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006

A few that I've particularly enjoyed:

Daybreak - 2250 AD by Andre Norton 1952
On the Beach by Nevil Shute 1957
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr. 1960
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard 1962
Ariel by Steven R. Boyett 1983
Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson 1985
Cloud Master by David Mitchell 2004

The World Without Us

The most obvious aspect of this book, and one that has delighted sci-fi writers for years, is what would happen to our cities should the human race be decimated.

Generally, the structures which would last the longest are either underground or made of stone. Khufu after all has diminished only 30 feet in 4500 years, and the astonishing subterranean cities in the Cappadocia region of Turkey have been around since the dawn of history.

The Chunnel and the Moscow subway system would have a a good chance of lengthy survival, though they will eventually be flooded. In the case of the NYC subway system, that will only take a matter of days.

Monuments such as Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, and Hagia Sofia will survive, as well as ceramic objects and pennies that contain substantial amounts of copper (unlike the current ones). Even paper will last a relatively long time if not exposed to air and water.

Poisonous Legacy

Of course, less palatable monuments will also survive. Take nuclear waste. Now there's something that's going to be around for a long long time. How can we warn future generations about the locations where we've stored it? What kind of sign would last for 10,000 years, and would people understand it? In 10,000 years languages will morph into unrecognizable forms.

Then there's plastic. Approximately one billion tons have been produced and all of it is still around. It doesn't biodegrade. It weathers to bits but that only means an increase in the number of creatures that can swallow it, often to their detriment. The oceans are filling up with it. The North Pacific Gyre is an expanse almost the size of Africa, covered with floating garbage, most of which is plastic.

Then there's genetically modified food, POPs and PCBs, and other unsavoury items. Humanity, we are told, has become a force of nature.

What About the Animals?

The author covers the origins of humans, and who might replace us if we disappeared. (The primate with the second largest brain, he suggests -- baboons.)

He visits the theory that megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons were extirpated by prehistoric hunters, and mentions a plan to return elephants to North America. He provides details on more recent extinctions (the dodo, the moa, the passenger pigeon), and discusses the vast numbers of birds killed each year by flying into glass windows or frying themselves on power lines.  One authority says one billion necks are broken annually in the US alone.  Birds will definitely do better without us.

As for our pets, cats will survive but dogs won't. Neither will cockroaches in unheated apartments, nor all those creatures that live in or on us, such as lice and numerous kinds of bacteria.

The End

The author concludes the book by mentioning the Voluntary Human Extinction Project, and the Transhumanist movement, which involves uploading our minds into machines.

Then he heads off into space, tracking the interstellar vehicles we have sent aloft -- the Pioneers and Voyagers -- which will exit the solar system and likely keep on travelling long after we are gone. So too will electromagnetic signals from Earth, including TV shows. I Love Lucy will play to the rest of the galaxy until the signal is lost in the background noise of the universe.

Physically, this well-written and wide-ranging book ends with a 30-page bibliography and a 16-page index. But it is the 14 pages of acknowledgements that gives a better idea of its scope. The author visited Chernobyl, the Korean DMZ, East Africa, a primeval Polish forest, an isolated coral reef in the Pacific, the abandoned resort of Varosha on Cyprus, the petrochemical complex stretching from Houston to Galveston, the Ekati diamond mine in the Canadian Arctic, and other places.

Fiskadoro

This is a post-holocaust tale published in 1985, just before the end of the Cold War. It's a mythopeic and hallucinatory work that questions the nature of reality, especially when memory fades and history is lost.

Fiskadoro is a 12-year-old boy living near Key West, now renamed Twicetown after being hit by two missiles carrying nuclear warheads. The warheads were duds.

Life is simple and uncouth, facilitated by the forgiving climate, the sea loaded with fish, and the debris of a pre-holocaust world. People use odd names, like Flying Man and King David Rat, and speak a mangled patois: "All I own do is gepback home."

Woven into the narrative are several journeys, the most important of which are the first two:

1. Fiskadoro, an Orpheus-like figure, is being taught how to how to play the clarinet by Mr. Cheung. He's captured by swamp-people who erase, among other things, his memory.

2. Mr. Cheung's grandmother was one of the last people to escape from Saigon before it fell to Communist forces. Now she is scarcely cognizant of her surroundings. Her long ordeal is described in detail.

3. Mr. Cheung himself travels to another island in pursuit of knowledge--a book that will explain the nuclear holocaust. He "believed in the importance of remembering."

4. Mr. Cheung's half-brother is "a famous, almost legendary figure" whose current name is Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. He recounts an odyssey to the mainland where he and his shipmates are captured by gamblers. He wants to obtain the drug used by the swamp-people to obliterate memories.

Fiskadoro is not a slice of sci-fi. It is a gritty surrealistic tale, closer to a novel like Fishboy by Mark Richard than McCarthy's The Road or Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

The author, Denis Johnson, is an award-winning poet and novelist. Some of his other novels are Already Dead, Recusitation of a Hanged Man, and Tree of Smoke.

Fiskadoro had nothing against the grandmother except that the whole time she sat there, every time, she smoked a long cigarillo backward, with the lit end resting in her mouth and the spit dripping down to darken the other end, the end she should have been smoking. Maybe this was how they smoked their cigarets in the old days...