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The Road - Cormac McCarthy
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 239
After Blood Meridian I was curious as to his other writings, and so found this.
I should have been warned off by the "Oprah's Book Club" label.
So, set in an indefinite future after a (presumably Nuclear Holocaust) has completely quieted all life on earth a father and son travel along a road heading westward through a landscape bereft of all life - plant or otherwise.
Only people, and the people are the same as in "Blood Meridian", pederasts, sodomites, cannibals, people at wits end trying to survive the end of days, and the freezing landscape of ash and rain and the invariably violent encounters with raiders and it's "touching" ending...
It got a lot of praise. Heaps of it. Only he paints in one colour, that of his sado-masochistic view of humanity, of the hopelessness of the human condition, of violence and death and worst of all even life.
I was on to him, the second book I've read of his, having read the first I was impressed with the narrative flow and voice, but - the second book, the same tricks repeated ad-nauseum and if he's still alive I'm pretty sure he's out somewhere at a Trump Rally and really, given the state of the world, I've had enough.
"Blood Meridian" was excellent, or I at least enjoyed the prose, characters, situations, but here he was largely exploiting my ignorance of the history of the "Old West"; in this I had little ignorance left to be exploited and so saw through the tricks, despite the consistent praise it's a vile book that offers no hope for the human condition and seemingly in the authors mind he rejoices in the despair he brings to paper.
A little too obvious and monochromatic for my taste, and I hastened to return it to the bookstore today. Not my cup of tea.
Sorcerer (1977, William Friedkin directing, starring Roy Scheider)
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 212
I'd never heard of this and it proved a charming surprise. About a group of men who all find themselves exiled for various reasons to a Porvenir, Chile and are offered a chance to redeem themselves with some great financial recovery if they'll take on the hazardous mission of driving an unstable load of nitroglycerin through the jungle some 200+ miles.
It's surprisingly engaging, and the pacing - exposition - plot development - well, all at odds with current film-making fashion. But well done, and the trucks they're given to accomplish their mission rival anything you saw in "Fury Road".
The reason - most probably - you never heard of it was that it was released in 1977 and immediately overshadowed by Star Wars.
William Friedkin also directed the "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist", Roy Scheider you'll recognize as the small-town sheriff from "Jaws".
The Mosquitos
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Theatre
- Hits: 187
At the Capitol in Nelson, a surreal play about how the Pandemic fractured everybody into their own conspiracy-laden world, complete with transformations into the most elaborate papier-mache masks...
Which was of interest to me because I have an abundance of overdue papier-mache projects that are overdue.
I brought a neighbour, the other one, who proved the perfect date/wingman. She paid attention, found it all hilarious, clapped, in short she wasn't someone who gets out a lot and showed great appreciation at my taking her. In contrast with the first neighbour, who at the sketch-comedy revue complained about how unfunny it was. I concurred, but that wasn't my fault and she didn't pay for the ticket, no returns for her!
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian (or, the evening redness in the west)
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 311
In a way, like "Fanny Hill" in which the author finds a thousand ways to describe the most basic act of love.
Only, with Cormac McCarthy, the act is not love but Violence, on a Biblical, Apocalyptic scale, Ostensibly about a kid from Tennessee who joins the "Glanton Gang" and does the grand tour of the Old West, hunting down Apaches, Indians, Niggers, who-have-you, it's an over the top ode to violence, rape, murder, torture, sadism, the cruelty of man, an obscene diatribe on mankind's theology, of blackened ears and scalps worn as trophies around the neck, of mans relations to animals and men and the universe in general.
It's bleak, but written with a rhythm and prose that carries you along like soldiers themselves, silhouetted on the blood-red horizon at the ends of the world, being carried forward always to a bloodier future where neither and never law nor order applies...
Brilliant, after it's fashion, and I will have to track down some of his other novels. It's always a pleasure to discover a new (to me) author, and he's a few I can follow up with. The themes, vile, visceral, but the prose becomes poetry and bears you along...
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