Post-apocalyptiana

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
Fallout 3 by Bethesda Software

As a kid, I read Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, a grim post-nuclear holocaust tale in which humanity ekes out a few final weeks of existence in underground bunkers. This stuff fascinated me. The time was the 70s and the Cold War was very much alive and frigid; we had regular duck-and-cover drills, and you could set your watch by the local Civil Defense siren’s weekly howl. I still dream of blinding flashes, of the anticipatory horror before the arrival of a flesh-vaporizing shockwave. Level 7 wasn’t great literature, but its uncompromising lack of sentiment gave it an enduring place in my memory.

I read Earth Abides back then, too, and I recall it as an almost romantic vision of post-apocalyptia. The holocaust is viral, not nuclear, and the humans are struggling but not doomed. Apathy is a far greater threat than man’s darker nature, which appears only in scattered incidents. A man uses a loose woman as bait for a trap. Another man carries a venereal disease and is disposed of by a community that would just as soon not deal with that particular vestige of the past.

It’s a fun book, in a way, because Stewart (who was a Berkeley English Professor) seemed to care less about the question, “What will a few survivors do with an empty Earth?” and more about the question, “What will the Earth do without Man?” It’s an ecologist’s fantasy, a rumination on the decay of society’s trappings and the response of the creatures who live because of or in spite of humanity.

I just finished a much different book, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Surprisingly, it has a happy ending, or as happy an ending as one could hope for from such a grim creation. A man and his (six-year-old?) son walk south over a burned-out wasteland of a continent. The son’s obsession that they remain “the good guys” in this world of roving cannibals provides all of the drive and much of the tension: how can they possibly remain the good guys? The father-and-son relationship provides the story’s heart. If you can get past McCarthy’s love of sentence fragments and hatred of quotation marks and apostrophes, the writing is beautiful, even though the subject matter couldn’t be more stark.

What horror overtook this world? McCarthy mentions “concussions” in a flashback, suggesting explosions; but if the apocalypse was nuclear, everyone would have long since died. As it stands, humans have done far better than plants and animals. McCarthy’s wasteland is almost too grim to be believable.

I suspect Fallout 3 got me in the mood for death and devastation on the grand scale. Fallout 3 takes place a couple hundred years after a nuclear war. Some fragments of society persist in a few dozen scattered Vaults, underground shelters with insular, vaguely autocratic societies. Above ground, which is where most of the action takes place, civilization lingers in scattered settlements (Auntie Entity would be proud). Out in the wild, you battle radscorpions, giant mole rats, and various and sundry other ghouls and super mutants. Oh, and this “wild”? It’s the Capital Wasteland, the ruins of Washington D.C., dotted with remnants of the Capital Building, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument.

The charm of Fallout 3 derives from its premise: we’re not fighting for our lives in a post-nuclear Earth, but an alternate universe, one in which human culture froze circa Leave it to Beaver. A local radio station plays great hits from the 40s: The Ink Spots “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” Bob Crosby’s “Way Back Home,” Billie Holiday’s “Easy Living.” My favorite, perhaps: Danny Kaye and the Andrew Sisters singing oh-so-politically incorrect “Civilization”:

Each morning a missionary advertise with neon sign
He tells the native population that civilization is fine
And three educated savages holler from a bongo tree
That civilization is a thing for me to see
So bongo, bongo, bongo I don’t want to leave the congo
Oh no no no no no
Bingle, bangle, bungle I’m so happy in the jungle I refuse to go
Don’t want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells, landlords
I make it clear
That no matter how they coax him
I’ll stay right here

Here’s a full review of Fallout 3 over at PC World.

What’s the appeal of these doomed worlds, I wonder? Do they appeal to the misanthropes among us, or the humanists who believe that human nobility is most manifest in the direst of worlds? They’re stories of survival, most of them (Level 7 being the notable exception) so perhaps we like to think that we, too, have what it takes to make it through to the other side. And what a Darwinian jackpot for the survivors! George R. Stewart certainly understood this; his survivors reproduce like rabbits in the aftermath of the plague.

I wish I had something profound to say, particularly regarding The Road. My sister tells me they’re teaching it in high school these days — not bad for a book with a pub date of 2006. But I’m feeling bereft of profundity today, so I’m left with a piss-poor take-home message.

People who eat people are bad people.

D.

Walnut, November 22, 2008. Category: At the movies, Books 'n' Authors, Reviews.

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