The Road Within
The Road, Cormac McCarthy, 2006, Picador. 307 pages.
The Road is a frontier novel of an awesome kind. An unnamed man and his ten year old son travel on foot through an America changed utterly by the impact of some cataclysmic event. We are not told what that event is. It is enough for us to know that it has happened and for us to inhabit the devastated landscape that remains. All that is left is grey, desiccated and, apart from a few human tribes, dead. Within these tribes life is reduced to primeval savagery and elemental survival, for they prey upon and literally devour each other. Apart from scavenging there is no other way to survive.
McCarthy’s novel focuses relentlessly on the here and now. History has gone; past events are dimly recalled at best. The future can barely be conceived. The boy was born just after the great event that changed the world, and his mother committed suicide shortly afterwards rather than be raped and killed by the predatory tribes. The novel owes more than a little to the tradition of American frontier fiction. The ‘Indians’ have been replaced by nameless and featureless gangs, but the same fears of natural savagery remain. The man and the boy carry a gun and two bullets as part of a suicide pact in case they should fall victim to the tribes. Their fears are well founded. On the way they encounter prisoners kept and farmed for their flesh. They witness a newborn baby being roasted on a spit.
Only one thing distinguishes the man and his son from the post-apocalyptic world they inhabit. Against all reason they continue to hope. They are trying to walk south to where they believe the weather may be warmer, and the boy can still find it in himself to want to help a lone straggler on the road, in spite of the risk. “If he is not the word of God,” the man says of his son, “God never spoke.” At the end of the journey, after his father has died, the boy is rescued by a nuclear family – father, mother and daughter – who have been tracking them on the road, and in whose society rests the last sliver of hope.
The Road is written in a pared down form of Englishthat eschews adjectives and all unnecessary punctuation. The novel provides no descriptions or insight into the society of the tribes. They are simply ‘other’. In a sense it describes an America under siege, not just by the awful landscape but by the moral codes of the enemies within. These are the consequences of a world stripped of civilisation, where there are only good guys and bad guys. Though it draws heavily on literary tradition and on key themes in the American psyche, it is arguable whether this book could have been written before 9/11. The Road portrays the social and environmental consequences of an America that has seen its darkest nightmares come true.
Marsh Fever
Salt, Jeremy Page, 2007, Penguin Books, 323 pages.
Anyone who has travelled through Norfolk and the Fens will hardly have failed to notice the skies. They’re somehow bigger, better, more dramatic than anywhere else. In Salt, as in a painting by Constable, the skies are part of the action. They’re a chorus, nudging the action along, commenting on and presaging events. They are rarely benevolent. When Goose, natural sage of the North Norfolk marshes and eccentric grandmother to Pip, the narrator of Jeremy Page’s debut novel predicts the coming of the great storm of January 1953 that wrecked the north Norfolk coast, he describes her doing so by reading the clouds, like a shaman:
“So here comes the cloud, freeing itself from the tangle of trees, heather and gorse above Blakeney. Fat, full, a couple of hundred feet above the saltmarsh. Goose’s cloud eye is on it straight…It’s a small fractonimbus known as a rag cloud. Rag clouds play a crucial part in my family’s story. There’s a rag cloud painted on the hull of a boat, and there’s a rag cloud in human form walking across a fen, dressed in heavy waterproofs. They’re always tricksters…” (p38)
For the most part Pip, a selective mute, can only communicate through writing. His story covers the arrival of his grandfather ‘Hands’, a German airman discovered by Goose stuck in the mud of Morston Marsh after falling from a bomber in 1944; through the birth of his mother, Lil’ Mardler, to her eventual suicide, a victim of ‘marsh fever’ that is the natural effect of living so close to the sky and to the uneventful flatlands; and his lifelong infatuation with Elsie, the red haired girl who is the only one to whom he can speak and with whom he eventually sleeps, and who may or may not be his sister.
The effect of the landscape is evoked through the slow accretion of detail, like silt falling upon a river bed. Images of escape recur and diminish: boats, fire, storms. Nothing is constant except the fact of the marshes themselves. The only way to make sense of things is through the telling of tales, which become as convoluted, shifting and elusive as the tides that govern this salty wilderness.
The location of the novel and the flora and fauna are observed in minute detail. Salt is a taleof tiny figures locked within a vast landscape on the edge of the known world, where jealousy, passion and murder burst like fireworks beneath the stars.
A Poisoned Inheritance
Mother’s Milk, Edward St Aubyn, 2006, Picador, 279 pages
As the title suggests, Mother’s Milk is an ironic take on the influence of inheritance. The Melrose family are the inheritors of their parent’s neuroses. Patrick’s upbringing featured in the trilogy, Some Hope, which describes in the first volume a childhood blighted by abuse from his father; in the second, Never Mind, two days of drug fuelled madness centred on Patrick’s attempts to arrange his father’s funeral in New York, and finally in Bad News, his return to relative stability
In an interview for the Observer, St Aubyn claimed that, though Mother’s Milk features the same poisoned and poisonous family as the trilogy it is a new story, not a sequel. “Some Hope is complete,” he remarked. “This is the starting of another story. But at the same time I didn’t want to go through the pseudo-originality of creating another person.” There is meat a-plenty for a dozen novels exploring the inherited neuroses of the Melrose family, about the likeness of which to St Aubyn’s own family a great deal has already been said. Here Patrick has settled down into a sort of tenuous respectability that is little more than skin deep. He is a barrister who never seems to do any work but manages to feed nevertheless a heavy drink problem; his wife Mary is devoted to their two children, Robert and Thomas to the virtual exclusion of her husband. Part of the story concerns Patrick’s desperate attempt to prevent his mother Eleanor from squandering the last remaining piece of the family estate, their holiday home in France, by giving it away to a bogus New Age foundation.
Maternal influence in St Aubyn’s writing is hardly benevolent. Eleanor’s gift of the family home is an act of sublime naiveté, which would be cruel if it she was aware of the cruelty. The last part of the book has Patrick investigating options for assisted suicide for his now completely dependent mother: at the last minute she withdraws from her professed desire, leaving Patrick free at last to “Do nothing.” It is the liberation he has been looking for all along.
The Beauty of Madness
Bedlam, Jennifer Higgie, 2006, Sternberg Press, 191 pages
Richard Dadd, the subject of this novel, was a promising artist in the 1830s and friends with a number of important figures on the Victorian scene. Though he did not come from an artistic family his father and siblings supported him vigorously, and he entered the Royal Academy at the age of 20. Later he came under the patronage of Thomas Phillips, whom he accompanied on an exhausting tour of Europe and the middle-east in 1842. While in Egypt what had probably been an underlying tendency towards mental illness began to emerge full blown. He became convinced he was under the influence of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. On his return to England he killed his father, believing him to be an imposter. He fled to France, where he almost killed another man, and was arrested. At his trial he was declared insane, and spent the rest of his life in Bethlem, and the Broadmoor hospitals. Here he was encouraged to paint, producing many pictures of fairies – a peculiarly Victorian obsession – and of oriental scenes recalled from his journey. Though incarcerated, he was not removed entirely from the artistic world, and some of his pictures were exhibited and sold. Dadd eventually died in old age of what was probably tuberculosis.
Much of Dadd’s reputation rests upon his unfortunate story, which has been told many times. Though he was insane – probably through schizophrenia – his paintings show none of the flamboyance of insanity. Many of them were painted from memory, and show accurate and evocative renderings of desert scenes.
Jennifer Higgie has written a fine novel evoking Dadd’s descent into madness. Through Dad’s eyes she describes the fateful journey through hot and strange countries, his passion for everything he saw, and his bewilderment at the strange customs and peoples he encountered. What is most striking about Higgie’s novel is the way she evokes the way Dadd's vision changes as his illness grows. The prose is beautifully balanced, and she never overplays her role. Even at his most insane we see, hear and feel the environment in which he found himself and which, arguably, blew his mind as a result of his acute sensibility.
People with schizophrenia who lack insight into their experiences believe absolutely in the truth of them. Those of us who do not have the illness tend to focus on the more dramatic consequences of those beliefs, ignoring or unable to comprehend the totality of the strange world such people inhabit. Jennifer Higgie leads us into the world as experienced by Richard Dadd and shows us the beauty and the pathos as well as the horror. Bedlam is an exotic and sensitive guide which appears not to have achieved the attention it so richly deserves.