Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
Your first book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
I am a huge Cormac McCarthy fan. I would go so far as to say that I consider him the best living writer. The Road isn’t actually my all-time favourite McCarthy book. That would be Blood Meridian which is an apocalyptic Western in which a band of desperados are hired to go to Mexico to kill Indians and they become this rampaging massacring army and it is scene after scene of surreal and endless violence.
But The Road is such a powerful story. You have this utterly bleak scenario and it is incredible how he draws on this limited palette of blackness and ash and coldness and snow. There is virtually nothing to hold on to. But then against this situation you have the father and the son, and the novel builds up this incredibly emotive relationship. Not least because you see the sacrifices the father has to make in terms of what it means to be human to protect his son. He has to be ruthless because everything has regressed back to a brutal kill or be killed state of nature. But the son retains some humanity.
There is a bit where someone tries to steal their cart full of stuff and they stop him and the father makes this man take off all his clothes and confiscates the guy’s clothes and they walk off and leave him, knowing he will obviously die. And the son is saying, ‘Why did we have to do that?’ And the dad explains, ‘We had to, otherwise he would have done it to us by taking our things.’
But the love the father has for the son and the son’s innate humanity are the two glimmers of hope which endure through the book. It is one of those devastating books which by the time you finish it leaves you numb and changed. I think McCarthy has looked very hard and honestly at the most difficult questions anyone can face about the meaning of life and he has extracted this kind, wonderful, powerful, unforgettable story from it.
What about Ridley Walker, by Russell Hoban?
I read this book when I was around 15 years old. It is set in a Kentish area after a nuclear war and it is as if the world has regressed. There is an element of religious totalitarianism going on. And everyone is speaking in a kind of eccentric, quasi-Chaucerian idiom. That is what I really liked about it – the unfamiliarity of the language because it is set in this post-apocalyptic world, and he goes one stage further than most sci-fi writers. I always have this slight love/hate relationship with sci-fi writers in that they can imagine a very wonderful kind of world but the language that they use to describe this world is often conventional and pedestrian. But, what Hoban does is show that it is not only a world that has been made strange by an apocalypse but a world in which the language itself has been re-invented. This is so is clever because the very fact that you struggle with the words to understand what is happening dramatises the level of language itself. I had never encountered a writer doing that with words before. I embarked on it thinking, post-apocalyptic novel – quite exciting, and then, a little bit like with A Clockwork Orange, you think, hang on a minute, this is something quite different, something I hadn’t thought of before.
And you say that, with The Book of Dave, Will Self actually acknowledged his debt to Hoban.
That’s right and a similar logic is at play in the conceit behind this novel. I have to say I am not a huge Will Self fan. I always want to like him a bit more than I end up liking him. But I think there is a genius idea in this book. Again it is a post-apocalyptic scenario. I think there was flooding from global warming. But what I find very funny about his central conceit is that you have this misogynistic taxi-driver called Dave who rants away and his kids have been taken into custody. He is like one of those cabbies we have all had who sound off these ignorant, opinionated views as you are stuck in the back as a captive audience. And, in the book, Dave writes out his rant on metal so it survives in the post-apocalyptic world.
Dr James Miller has published a number of academic articles about African-American literature, Civil Rights and the 1960s counter-culture. He lectured in American literature at King’s College London and currently teaches creative writing at London’s South Bank University. He has been fascinated by apocalyptic novels from an early age. His new book, Sunshine State, is set in a futuristic world destroyed by climate change and the resulting economic breakdown. As a child Miller believed that if he had clean water, tinned food, medical equipment and a rifle he could survive nuclear war. But Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel on nuclear war smashed that belief. ‘We lived just outside London and I would often sit there thinking, are we just far enough away not to be vaporised when they vaporise London?’
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