Category Archives: Books

On “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

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It was published in 2006, and I recalled of it only its central image as gleaned from reviews: a man and a boy trudging through a bleak post-apocalyptic world, pushing a shopping cart with all they own inside it. But now The Road has become a movie and it seemed urgent to finally read the book. I needed to let the author create the story in my mind before the filmmaker would.

Having done so this past week, I can only echo the praise lavished on this Pulitzer Prize winner. I did find the style somewhat jarring at first, McCarthy’s way of mixing complete and incomplete sentences inconsistent it seemed to me, but soon he had settled into something that worked better, or maybe I had simply settled into his language and cadence, caught up in the daily and wearisome journey of the two protagonists in that place beyond cataclysm, with its “creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland” and “the banished sun circl[ing] the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp,” the long trudge broken by reprieves of food and warmth, but mostly defined by cold and hunger and suspense — a constant undercurrent of menace, the cannibal “bad guys” near, their evil intimated in horrors like the remains of an infant on a spit.

When I was done it, the story nagged at me as a parable does, with both understanding and confusion. Yes, I see, I do see, but what am I to know from this? What does it really mean? 

For me, as for many readers, the heart of the work is the relationship between the man and the boy — father and son. I loved their exchanges, cryptic but revealing, like outcroppings of love in the pervasive silence of the ashen desolation around them. Each occupies the positions one might expect of their roles as parent and child — the protective, reassuring father and the fearful, dependent child — and yet what makes these unnamed characters so resonant for me is that they don’t stay at stereotype or expectation. Each moves between wisdom and fear the way all humans will, regardless of role. The man is as needy as a child; he is often fearful; he often fails to get beyond an instinctive violence in his encounters with others. The boy can be as protective as a parent; he exhibits a moral conscience that judges his father’s actions; he grasps responsibility. When he is heartbroken over his father’s leaving a thief naked and robbed of everything, essentially to die, the man says, “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything,” and the boy says, “Yes I am. I am the one.”

The story seems a parable to me of being human — as parent or child — but engaged in the reciprocity and mutuality each generation in their humanness must experience with the other.  

“Don’t read [this book] now if you are feeling particularly fragile, especially if you are a parent,” said British writer Victoria Glendinning in this past Saturday’s Globe and Mail, choosing The Road as her pick for “book of the decade.” I’d advise quite the opposite, however. I think The Road is a book well suited for parental fragility and fears. Children know so much more than we realize, and we as parents often so much less. We must help each other through the ashes of what happens. We can’t ever really protect each other in a world so utterly unsafe (be it future, or the one we occupy now), except for the enduring safety of love. But we can love, can’t we?


William Kurelek’s joy

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This week, in the local used books establishment, I found a real treasure: Kurelek’s Canada (Pagurian Press, 1978), which is no longer in print. It contains more than 30 reproductions in colour, as well as some in black and white, of the paintings of William Kurelek (1927-1977), and also his writing about them. And all this for only a dollar!

I’ve liked Kurelek’s work ever since I first encountered it, through A Prairie Boy’s Winter (1973) and A Prairie Boy’s Summer (1975), and then his wonderful A Northern Nativity, which pictures the holy family in a variety of ethnic and geographic settings — from a fisherman’s hut to an Amish Mennonite buggy to a boxcar to a soup kitchen. For many years, until they became just too faded, we had four framed calendar prints of some of the prairie scenes hanging on one of our walls. 

Kurelek had an unhappy childhood in many ways and a complex relationship with his father — both hating and worshipping him, he said later. He was the oldest of seven children of a hardworking prairie couple (Alberta and Manitoba), his parents of Ukrainian immigrant origin. He was painfully shy, sensitive, artistic, but inept at those mechanical and physical things that might have earned his parents’ praise. So powerful was his desire to do art, however, that he risked their disapproval to study it. 

In 1957, Kurelek risked his parents’ disfavour once again by converting to the Roman Catholic church (his family had been nominally Orthodox). His mother, he writes, was “particularly vocal in expressing her view that religion killed joy.” Yet the theme of Kurelek’s Canada is joy, he says in his foreword, “my view of joy, both remembered and observed, in this my native land.”

Kurelek was also a “message painter,” doing a series of 160 paintings on the Passion of Christ, for example, housed at the Niagara Falls Art Gallery, but there’s no didacticism in these paintings of ordinary people in the various parts of this country doing such ordinary things. They stir joy in me too, over the colours, over his sense of the land, its diversity and yet the way its parts cross-reference each other: the land in Manitoba “so flat it is like being on an ocean” and then the ocean off Nova Scotia giving him “the same feeling as the prairie in winter when the landscape is an endless series of wind-sculpted snowdrifts…”

Kurelek’s sensitivity to this country’s landscapes and history, and his sensitivity to the pleasures and dreaminess of being young, have always resonated with me. It’s as if his memories are my memories too, no matter how different the details.

"Skating on Spring Run-Off," pages 98-99

 

But in studying and enjoying my “new” book this week, I find this artist is giving me something else. He’s giving me memories of my father. What do I mean? Well, it occurred to me that the specific references in so many of these works belong to Kurelek’s generation, which of course, is my father’s generation as well. That’s obvious enough, but I never thought of this before, because I didn’t need to, I suppose, just delighting in them for my own reasons. Now, however, my dad (88) has Alzheimer’s disease and is so very gone from us already, and in the last weeks declining even further. 

I took the Kurelek book along when I went over to see him yesterday afternoon. He was in bed, mostly sleeping. When he opened his eyes, I showed him “Skating on Spring Run-Off.” He looked at it but he didn’t seem to see it.

I see it though. I see his being, his memory, there. He was a boy of the farm, a boy of hard work, close to his horses and dogs, a boy sensitive to the land and the seasons, an athletic boy too, amazingly athletic actually, and here he is again, skating where the ice is found, “skim[ming] over the prairie surface with breath-taking ease,” feeling as the artist also remembered it when he painted the scene, “as though you have wings on your heels.” 

Has this ever happened to you, a familiar story or beloved artist’s work suddenly meaning something else for you altogether? 


What book could I be?

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Over at the blog “Considerations,” David Warkentin tells how he recently spent a couple hours in the library of Douglas College, being a book. It was part of  the Living Library, a movement designed to “promote dialogue, reduce prejudices and encourage understanding” amidst the diversity of our pluralistic world. It’s all about “engaging people,” he explains, “instead of just borrowing books.” David chose the title “Engaging Our Stories – Living Amidst Spiritual and Religious Diversity” for his book-self, and people could “borrow” him for up to a half-hour to discuss anything related to his topic. 

This sounded like a wonderful idea, and it got me thinking. What book could I be?

Most days I’m not an expert at anything, but I imagined for a moment that I might land in the “how-to” section of the library. Next I had some fun at my bookshelves, perusing them for what title(s) I might choose for myself. Here’s what I came up with — borrowing only the title, please realize, and not the contents! 

1. On the writing life.

Let’s see… How about Great Expectations (Dickens), or, continuing the metaphor more realistically, All Things Are Labor (Arnoldi). No, that just sounds pretentious. I think Wilderness Tips (Atwood) should do it here.

2. On marriage.

Well, besides 35 years of experience, what do I know? Two Solitudes (MacLennan) for starters. Marriage is good and definitely worth the perseverance, though, so let’s call me-on-marriage The Progress of Love (Munro).

3. On parenting.

Oh my, the possibilities are endless here! Expensive People (Oates), or Here Be Dragons (Newman). A Multitude of Sins (Ford) — mine, I mean — and then they’re Gone with the Wind (Mitchell). On balance, though, A Good House (Burnard). But it all comes down to two pieces of advice:  See the Child (Bergen) and Mercy Among the Children (Richards).

4. On the life of faith.

Well, that’s The Heart of the Matter (Greene) and some days, Such a Long Journey (Mistry). But perhaps what I’d like to get at is mystery and very life itself. How about Breathing Lessons (Tyler)?

5. On becoming an “elder” (chronologically, that is, not a position in the church).

Just at the very beginning here, so what I know so far is Independence Day (Ford), and The Reprieve (Sartre). Also a chance for Final Payments (Gordon) in a metaphorical sense, though when the recession eats at our RSPs, literally too. One faces ahead The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro), finds oneself in The Summer before the Dark (Lessing). The dark of death, yes, but only as transition. On, on, on, then, to The Radiant Way (Drabble).

(Thanks, D.W., for the idea!)