Post-Apocalypse Now?
On my honeymoon, I read both The Stand and The Road — because what better time to consider life after the apocalypse than the two weeks after you get married?
King’s soapy, genre-serial epic — which is now, unsurprisingly, a comic book (and a rather good one, too) — works on the assumption that, following the total collapse of civilization, the survivors more or less immediately begin working to rebuild a functional society. McCarthy takes the opposite tack: After almost everyone dies, the remaining few quickly descend into a violent, anarchic free-for-all.
The key difference between the two situations presented is that in The Stand, King leaves the remnants of civilization standing. Most people die, but America’s infrastructure, at least, remains. That allows King to more or less ignore the resource problem. Everything that ever existed becomes free, and with so few people left alive, the book’s assumption is that, with a few exceptions (military-grade weapons), there’s plenty for all.
The Road‘s world, on the other hand, is an ashen wasteland — burnt to a crisp by a season of firestorms. Resource collection is not just the first order of business for survivors, it’s the only order of business. There’s no time to reestablish civil society, or any social cooperation, because there’s barely enough time to track down the few remaining scraps of food.
I suppose I have a harder time believing in McCarthy’s vision, mostly for its lack of human innovation and cooperation. It’s not that I think that a world like he describes would be entirely peaceful; on the contrary, I think it’s more than likely that there would be ongoing war, or at least irregular violent squabbling, between various ad-hoc tribes. But it seems to me that there would be tribes of some sort, and cooperative systems, however crude, put in place in order to increase the welfare of the tribe (or at least some of its members). There would be resources to develop and harvest — at Volcano National Park, even the darkest, most barren lavascapes still showed signs of green — and humans would gather together to attempt to gather those resources and put them to use.
The Stand‘s vision of cooperation, on the other hand, is far too easy, consisting mostly of minor squabbling at town meetings. Granted, King’s book is informed by King’s clear to desire to craft a doorstop-sized epic, which in practice means pitting humanity against itself in an age-old battle between mystical forces of good and evil. One gets the sense that the societal structure questions the book raises are mostly interesting to King as diversions on the path to the inevitable apocalyptic showdown. Disappointingly, I think, he never really figures out what form that showdown should take. So when he cannot delay the conclusion any longer, he whiffs, blowing everything away with a nuke-ex-machina.
For a better balance between the two visions, you can turn to Robert Kirkman’s too-good-to-be-a-comic-book* zombie serial, The Walking Dead. You’ll hear a lot more about this series in the neat future, as Frank Darabont is producing a TV adaptation for AMC this fall. Volume 12, in which the characters finally reach Washington, D.C., just hit stores this week, and, as always, it’s thoroughly gripping. The thing about the series is that it’s not really about zombies. Sure, there are hordes of undead running around Kirkman’s East Coast, but they’re fixtures in the apocalyptic landscape rather than the story’s focus. Instead, Kirkman’s series is about surviving after the apocalypse, about how the bonds of family and friendship hold up under the greatest possible strain, and about how small societies form and breakdown in the absence of civilization.
As in The Stand, you see some cooperation between individuals, some attempts to permanently settle and improve their collective lot. But it’s never as easy, stable, or binary as in King’s book. Tiny tribes and outpost form and fall, some successful, others less so. Usually, those societies must face the unintended consequences of their decisions — to stay in a particular location, to rely on a particular set of resources for food or energy. The question that the characters always seem to be responding to is that one that drives most societies: Given the limited knowledge, time, and physical resources we have, what do we do now? When there are disagreements over the answer, you see fissures in the social framework; friends fight, shift allegiances, become enemies. Moments of hope become moments of terror, and vice-versa.
As drama, it’s as smart, inventive, and addictive as any genre serial I can recall. But even more than that, it’s a surprisingly subtle exercise in imagining how societies composed of contemporary Americans might form, fail, and succeed in the absence of national authorities. For King, civilization was about taking a stand against a looming, certain evil. For McCarthy, it was about whether the existence of progeny is enough to maintain the self-will to survive. But Kirkman’s obsession is with something less grandiose — yet, for most of us, far closer to home: the day-to-day struggle for comfort and stability. It’s both the reason we build societies and the reason we leave them, hoping to find something better. It’s also a large part of the reason why we get married, buy homes, and settle down. And I for one am just be glad not to have to do it while being attacked by zombies.
*I should note that I don’t actually mean this as an insult to comics. I’m a pretty huge comic book geek! It’s just that Walking Dead strikes me as a really superior example of the form, and one that ought to appeal to folks who don’t typically like comics as a medium.
You should give Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” a shot, then. You might find that it strikes the balance you seem to be looking for.
“The Road,” though, is my favorite book.
— Erik Vanderhoff · Aug 7, 08:21 PM · #
In The Road, it’s not just an issue of lack of resources, but what few resources that exist in the post-apocalyptic world of the book are disappearing. The catastrophe mentioned (but never specified) in the book appears to have killed off most of the animal and plant life, and what’s left is dying off. I remember a passage in the book in which the characters visit the ocean, but all the fish in it are dead and McCarthy describes it as a lifeless sea.
I’d agree that in most circumstances one could see civilization, of a sort, re-emerge soon after an apocalypse, even if it’s a more primitive agrarian one. But you can’t have an agrarian civilization with no plant or animal life. My impression of the world in The Road was that it was one that is truly God-forsaken, in that even the most minimal earthly things that one could look at for hope of some sort of a future (new crops growing, herds being replenished, etc.) were non-existent or were visibly on their last legs. That factor is one of the ones that made the book so powerful and haunting.
— Mark in Houston · Aug 8, 12:41 AM · #
I mean, seriously, Mr. Suderman? There seems something strange about criticizing a book because of how “realistic” it’s depiction of Armageddon is…
Oh well, but yea, The Road, AS A NOVEL, is breathtakingly beautiful. Like most McCarthy novels, the last few sentences just destroy me. The trout in the river? C’mon. Haunting.
— D-Rock · Aug 8, 05:02 AM · #
D-Rock, I didn’t mean it as a criticism of the novel as literature. The Road is a great book, spare and haunting and almost perfectly paced. But its vision of human nature after the apocalypse nagged at me after I read it, in part because of how unrelentingly spare and lonely it is. Part of what I look for in novels is how well they capture human nature, and although there was much that I thought The Road got powerfully right, I was a little less convinced by its view of cooperation in society. And so I thought it would be interesting to take ~30 minutes and actually try to compare its vision to two similar works I’d recently read. But none of this should be taken as a slam on The Road, which I really enjoyed.
— Peter Suderman · Aug 8, 03:27 PM · #
The problem with The Road is that it’s impossible to imagine a catastrophe that would kill all plants and animals while leaving even a remnant of humanity alive. In fact, the Earth’s biosphere should be so screwed up survival even for a few hours ought be impossible. If it’s really so extreme that life is going extinct homo sapiens should be leading the way, not bringing up the trailing rear.
— JonF · Aug 8, 08:57 PM · #
I second the recommendation of “The Passage.” I am also an apocalypse geek — I even enjoyed “The Postman.” Cronin’s world is, for my money, the best post-apocalyptic depiction since “A Canticle for Leibowitz.”
I loved “The Road” but McCarthy’s emphasis was on two characters’ response to the world they inhabit, not the world itself.
— Roberto · Aug 8, 11:17 PM · #
Thanks for the response, Mr. Suderman. I think you raise some valid points, and thank you for the post.
— D-Rock · Aug 8, 11:45 PM · #
If you like books and comics with an apocalypse plot line. I like the comic “Y the Last Man” all the men on earth die, except for one.
— danwesjac · Aug 9, 04:31 PM · #
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— supra skytop · Aug 11, 06:43 AM · #