Island is the same way, only more so. It’s perfectly obvious that the characters exist not as figures of human experience, but as convenient mouthpieces for expressing Huxley’s ideas about that experience. This doesn’t necessarily make those ideas incoherent or uninteresting – they’re mostly coherent, and very interesting indeed. But it does make the story itself pretty bland. You don’t read this because it’s a great and well-written story. You read and enjoy it because of course it’s more enjoyable to consider Huxley’s theories on religion, politics,
drugs, God, and society in the story format than it would be if he’d just written a bunch of essays. Actually, maybe he did write a bunch of essays, which he then cut and past into a story as dialogue assigned to whichever characters were convenient.
My father-in-law, an extremely conservative man in all things
political, recently gave me a book called
Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, by a guy named
Jack Cashill. Of course I was disdainful and skeptical to say the least, but having given him Al Gore’s
The Assault on Reason, I decided I couldn’t in good faith expect him to read and take seriously my propaganda if I wasn’t prepared to give his propaganda the same respect. So I dove in.
Mr. Cashill, just to dispell some of the assumptions I myself had before reading his book, is nothing like an
Anne Coulter or a
Sean Hannity. Coulter’s shrieking, painfully stupid collections of rhetorical bullshit are about as low as it gets. Ditto for Hannity (though not even he can match Coulter’s brazen unreasonableness). Cashill, on the other hand, actually makes arguments before he trots out the conservative talking points to which he believes those arguments lend support. The large majority of the text is devoted to presenting his research and fact-finding, and I must admit I learned quite a few new things, and that he gave me no reasons to mistrust his facts any more than I trust Al Gore’s.
His sections on Mumia, Ward Churchill, and Michael Moore were especially convincing (though I’d be interested in reading more from the other side about Mumia and Churchill). The extensive chapters on the American Left’s failure to oppose, or naïve decision to embrace, Soviet communism were less so, though the facts he brought forward about figures like Lillian Hellman and Alger Hiss were interesting. Same for the chapter on multiculturalism; interesting facts, but nothing too damaging to the idea of “left-wing” as I know it. Richard Rorty, for example, has said as much about the Left and communism, and made some of the same complaints about the frequent absurdities of deconstruction and multi-culturalism. Cashill’s arguments may strike effectively at the sort of undifferentiated stereotypical “liberalism” to which most conservatives oppose themselves, but it does not make me any less inclined toward positions with which I agree that also happen to be “left-wing.” In the end, despite the pleasantly surprising credibility and reasonableness that Cashill brought to the table, he still returned to the talking points – now bolstered by much-needed facts and concrete examples, perhaps, but still vague and vacuous enough to be consigned to the distracting culture-war rhetoric I had assumed them to be when I suspiciously opened up to page one. This is especially the case with the final chapter on the sexual revolution, in which Cashill started too frequently indulging in the “liberals are perverts who hate families and love abortions!!!” riff.
In the end, a valuable experience – reading something from the “other side,” reading as a gesture of respect to someone with whom you have serious disagreements, putting into practice the virtue of reading “charitably,” of staying truly open-minded, of taking things as they come and giving the benefit of the doubt and all that. And besides that, I really did learn some new things: Mumia is probably guilty, Ward Churchill really is kind of an ass, and Michael Moore can manipulate facts with the best of conservative spinmeisters (although,
Hoodwinked aside,
Sicko is a must-see).
Patrick Suskind’s
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a kinky German crime story about a guy with olfactory superpowers. Set in the 18th century France of
Les Miserables or
The Three Musketeers, Suskind’s novel revels in the opportunity the plot provides to describe in beautiful, lurid, and surprising detail what is usually the least-described of the five senses. We all know that smell is powerful, of course – that it is the sense most strongly connected to memory, for example, or that pheremones are powerful forces of sexual attraction. But we do not often devote whole novels to it, and the vocabulary of smell is not as developed, or at least not as familiar, as the vocabularies of sound, sight, touch, and taste. So at the very least, the concept is an interesting one.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the super-smeller, is born in a fish market on a pile of discarded guts. Of course. He is left for dead by his mother, but survives and raised in a for-profit orphanage, where even as a baby he freaks out his fellow inmates so much they try to smother him. When he gets older the orphanage manager sells him to a tanner. He survives this too.
One night he sees – or rather smells, since he identifies and finds everything by smell, not sight – a beatiful girl walking down the street. He is struck by her scent, as for most of his life he has been mostly surrounded by bad smells, and this is his first encounter with something pleasant. He follows her, stalks her (he’s a bit crazy, by the way), and eventually, almost unintentionally, kills her. He becomes obsessed with finding a way to preserve her scent.
Eventually he makes his way to the most famous perfumery in Paris, where he impresses the owner by mixing on the spot a perfect copy of the scent being sold with great success by a competitor. Of course he becomes and apprentice, and makes his boss a lot of money. Along the way he learns how to take the essential scent from things and preserve them in alchohol, which is what he really wants to know. When he has learned everything he can from the master, he strikes out on his own for Grasse, the center of the perfume industry.
Other things happen, but to summarize – he kills lots of beautiful girls in order to obtain their scents and combine them into a master perfume. The finale tells what happens to the people around him when he dons this master perfume. It is more than a little ridiculous.
As I say, the concept is intriguing. The style and execution are passable but nothing special, though one should keep in mind that it’s a translation. The
movie version, starring Ben Wishaw, Alan Rickman, and Dustin Hoffman, is much the same: really interesting, but nothing particular special as far as script, visuals, or acting are concerned. I would say that you might as well see the movie as read the book, except that the novel’s long descriptive passages about what things, places, or people smell like are worth the extra time. All in all, an entertaining read.
Far superior is
Margaret Laurence’s
A Jest of God.
Laurence is my wife’s favorite writer, predictably Canadian given my wife’s love for all books Canook (including
Margaret Atwood and
David Adams Richards). After many glowing recommendations at the breakfast table, I finally decided to see for myself just how good a writer Laurence really is. And she is really, really good. Margaret Atwood’s forward calls
Jest of God “an almost perfect book,” and that seems about right. As in McCarthy (but not that good!), nothing is wasted, everything is necessary, story and characters are subtle but spare and never ostentatious.
Jest of God won the 1966 Governor General’s Award. (For you red-blooded Americans unfamiliar with national subservience, the “
governor general” is sort of like the Duke of Canada, and gets appointed by the Queen. Currently it’s some Haitian girl, so I guess “Duchess of Canada” is more accurate. It’s really quite nice, as far as vestiges of imperial glory go.)
Sorry.
Jest of God, which won the 1966 Governor General’s Award and is published by the University of Chicago Press, is the third of Laurence’s five-book Manawaka series. Rachael Cameron is a middle-aged woman stuck at home with her passive-aggressive mother in the small town where she grew up, struggling to overcome fear and insecurity and discover love and freedom. The kind of storyline makes for a book that has to be really good if it’s to avoid being really bad. Laurence succeeds. Her portrait of Rachael, and especially of Rachael’s inner dialogues, is extremely sharp and sympathetic. This is a character study, full of insights, compelling even for people who don’t live on the desolate Canadian prairie with their annoying mothers. I will definitely read the rest of her books.
But now to the piece de resistance, the summit, the pinnacle, the book I really want to write about:
Cormac McCarthy’s
Outer Dark. Let me say again: Cormac McCarthy is the Ultimate Badass. This is only my second trip to his literary Pleasure Island, but already I can say with no hesitation that he is hands-down my Favorite Author. He is more Favorite than Umberto Eco, than Emerson, than Dostoevsky. He’s like all those guys combined, the Superman of superheroes, the Captain Planet of the guys who make up Captain Planet. Behold, he is like unto a god to me.
Enough? Ok. I’m sure you’re probably turned off from reading it fover. Down to the book itself. Like
The Road, but even more so, the beauty of
Outer Dark comes not from great and subtle characters, or from a brilliant plot, but from the sheer poetry of the writing itself. The plot is almost incidental (which, as becomes clearer at the end of the book, is actually the point), and the characters drift through the world with little identity and personality (again, this is part of the point). But the words . . . let me quote you a few passages.
These are from the small italicized interludes scattered throughout the main text. They grow increasingly shakespearean as the story. progresses. Here’s an early one:
They entered the lot at a slow jog, the peaceful and ruminative stock coming erect, watchful, shifting with eyes sidled as they passed, the three of them paying no heed, seeming blind with purpose, passing through an ether of smartweed and stale ammonia steaming from the sunbleared chickenrun and on through the open doors of the barn and almost instantly out the other side marvelously armed with crude agrarian weapons, spade and brush-hook, emerging in an explosion of guineafowl and one screaming sow, unaltered in gait demeanor or speed, parodic figures transposed live and intact and violent out of a proletarian mural and set mobile upon the empty fields, advancing against the twilight, the droning bees and windtilted clover.
This is from the last one:
What discordant vespers do the tinker’s goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema. Hounded by grief, by guilt, or like this cheerless vendor clamored at the heel through wood and fen by his own querulous and inconsolable wares in perennial tin malediction.
Yet all this Dantean loftiness is kept perfectly separate and balanced with a rendition of Appalachian backwoods dialect so precise and evocative you can almost hear the slack-jawed yokels offering to engage you in a banjo duet.
She was at the stove, turning fire up out of the dead gray ashes. Are ye not married? she said.
No mam.
She added wood. She lifted the lid from a pot crusted with blackened orts and tilted it for inspection. Her voice hollow and chambered: Where’s your youngern.
What?
I said where’s your youngern.
I’ve not got nary.
The babe, the babe, the old woman crooned.
They ain’t nary’n.
Hah, said the old woman. Bagged for the river trade I’d judge. Yon sow their might make ye a travelin mate that’s drowned her hoggets save one.
She sat very straight in the chair. Cradled among the stovewood against the wall was a sleeping hog she had not seen. The old woman turned, a small bent androgyne gesturing with a black spoon, waiting.
That’s a lie what you said, the girl whispered hoarsely. I never. He was took from me. A chap. I’m a-huntin him.
At the risk of spoiling things a bit (though not the story itself, as it has nothing much to do with any of the preceding plot), I want to quote also the last chapter of the book, because it is so freaking amazing, and I really want to convince you to check out Cormac McCarthy. If you don’t want to read it, stop now, and go buy the book for yourself. Here it is:
IN LATER YEARS he used to meet a blind man, ragged and serene, who spoke him a good day out of his constant dark. He overtook him tapping through the bright noon dust with his cane, his head erect in that air of wonder the blind wear. Holme would go by but not the blind man has stopped him with his greeting.
How you, said Holme.
Well as ever, said the blind man. Have ye a smoke?
No sir. I ain’t.
Nary a-tall?
I don’t have the habit.
Aye, said the blind man. He unbuttoned the bib of his overalls and brought forth tobacco. Well, he said, it’s good to see the sun again ain’t it.
Holme looked at the cups of blue phlegm which regarded him. It is, he said.
Aye. After so long a time. He trickled tobacco into the slender trough of paper his fingers held and put away the pouch.
It is a right pretty day, Holme said.
The blind man smiled. I know ye, he said. I’ve spoke afore with ye.
You might of, Holme said. I don’t remember.
The blind man twisted up the ends of his cigarette and took it between his lips. Yes, he said. I’ve passed ye on these roads afore.
They’s lots of people on the roads these days, Holme said.
Yes, the blind man said. I pass em ever day. People goin up and down in the world like dogs. As if they wasn’t a home nowheres. But I knowed I’d seen ye afore.
Holme spat. I got to get on, he said.
Yes, the blined man said. Is they anything you need?
Need?
Anything you need.
I don’t need nothin.
I always like to ast.
What are ye sellin?
I ain’t sellin nothin. I’m at the Lord’s work. He don’t need your money.
It’s good he don’t need mine. I reckon you’re some kind of a preacher.
No. No preacher. What is they to preach? It’s all plain enough. Word and flesh. I don’t hold much with preachin.
Holme smiled. What have you got to give? Old blind man like you astin folks what they need.
I don’t know. Nobody’s never said.
Well how would you expect to get it.
Just pray for it.
You always get what you pray for?
Yes. I reckon. I wouldn’t pray for what wasn’t needful. Would you?
I ain’t never prayed. Why don’t ye pray back your eyes?
I believe it’d be a sin. Them old eyes can only show ye what’s done there anyway. If a blind man needed eyes he’d have eyes.
Still I believe you’d like to see your way.
What needs a man to see his way when he’s sent their anyhow?
I got to get on, Holme said.
The blind man leaned oone hand on the cane where he had rested it against his leg. He sucked on the cigarette and two jets of blue smoke slid from his thin nostrils and faded in the air. I heard a preacher ina town one time, he said. A healin preacher wanted to cure everybody and they took me up there. They was a bunch of us there all cripple folks and one old man they did claim had thowed down his crutches and they told it he could make the blind see. And they was a feller leapt up and hollered out that nobody knowed what was wrong with. And they said it caused that preacher to go away. But they’s darksome ways afoot in this world and it may be he weren’t no true preacher.
I got to get on, Holme said.
I always did want to find that feller, the blind man said. And tell him. If somebody don’t tell him he never will have no rest.
I’ll see ye, Holme said.
Aye, said the blind man. It might be we’ll meet again sometime.
Holme raised a hand in inane farewell and set off down the road again. The blind man’s cane softly tapping faded behind him. He went on, soundless with his naked feet, shambling, gracelorn, down out of the peaceful mazy fields, his toed tracks soft in the dust among the cratered shapes of horse and mule hoofs and before him under the high afternoon sun his shadow be-wandered in a dark parody of his progress. The road went on through a shadeless burn and for miles there were only the charred shapes of trees in a dead land where nothing movied save windy rifts of ash that rose dolorous and died again down the blackened corridors.
Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reaered only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.
Going back the way by which he came he met again the blind man tapping through the dust. He waited very still by the side of the road, but the blind man passing turned his head and smiled upon him his blind smile. Holme watched him out of sight. He wondered where the blind man was goind and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.
