LUCIDMEDIA

Three Books to Movies to See in 2009

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Wednesday, 21 January 2009 09:59

The Road By Cormac McCarthy

Last year, the prose of Cormac McCarthy impressed as the foundation of the Coen Brothers adaptation No Country for Old Men, which went on to win numerous awards. In the literary sphere, McCarthy followed-up No Country with The Road, and I guess as fate would have, the same will be done for McCarthy-based film adaptations as well. But The Road, pardon the pun, is miles away from No Country, while being utterly bleak and depressing in its own way. Still, out from underneath its vivid monochromatic setting, there’s still the slim chance that the smallest breath of hope will get through. But then again, you have to pour over some of the most vividly depressing end-of-the-world talk ever put to paper.

The setting is the post-apocalyptic America in an unspecified future date. What happened to the U.S. and how this disaster affected rest of the world, is never explained. All we know is that this unnamed man, and his son, are one of the few survivors. They walk the road west as winter approaches. They wear filthy rags, push a rickety shopping cart filled with the basic provisions of survival and scavenge whatever they can, whenever they can. They must always be on the look out for threats; from fellow starving survivors that might take advantage of them, to cannibalistic hordes that would certainly take advantage of them.

But don’t mistake such descriptions as meaning that The Road is like any other post-apocalyptic thriller. The thriller part of The Road is in the reading and appreciating that what you’re experiencing through the narrative is a chillingly close to reality take on what it would be like for a man, and his son, struggling to survive not only with the modern conveniences we all know, but without the basic necessities. McCarthy takes great pains to lay out a detailed description of an earth utterly ravaged by a disaster so complete that not even plants have survived. You can’t grow anything because there’s nothing to grow, and even if their were seeds still capable of raising life, the soil is devoid of plant enriching nutrients, and water is all but scarce.

There are no zombies, no Mad Max style warriors, no postman gingerly rebuilding the country one letter at a time; just desolation, the wind, and the lightly falling grey ash that’s now what passes for snow. The most frightening part of The Road is not the desolation, or the isolation, but rather the struggle; those times that the man and his son are on the brink of starvation, but forge ahead. The times that they are faced with hordes of what the boy euphemistically calls “bad guys” and the man’s knowledge that if discovered it’ll be the choice between killing himself and his son with their last remaining bullets or accepting an unacceptable fate at the hands of the uncivilized hordes.

I’m itching to see how these various vignettes are visualized on screen, because Hollywood always tries to avoid true misery. You can’t sell famine, fear and desolation. You can’t sell the occasional contemplation of suicide or the internal philosophizing over how you try and explain to yourself why you fight to live in a world filled with death. But what sticks out most of all is that in terms of narrative, The Road has a very inelegant writing style. There are no chapters, barely any grammar, no one has a proper name and sometimes flashbacks, dialogue, and descriptions seem to run together like a fever dream. The story is accessible, but as to how it’ll translate, is a mystery in and of itself.

Angels & Demons By Dan Brown

Before The Da Vinci Code, there was Angels & Demons, and if you read the former after the latter (as intended, because that’s the order they were published in), you might be struck by something: they’re pretty much the same story. In both books, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon finds himself drawn into a murder mystery where the victim is a respected intellectual. He teams with a brilliant and beautiful woman with a personally vested interest in the victim, and they follow the clues to a conspiracy involving pseudo-archaeology and a conspiracy at the centre of the Catholic Church. And the stranger park is I think I like Angels & Demons better than The Da Vinci Code.

For one thing, the story seems fresher. Even though I, like so many others, read Da Vinci first, it definitely feels like the copycat effort. Where as I thought while reading The Da Vinci Code that it took forever to get anywhere, Angels seems to keep the pace that much quicker. As a storyteller myself, I’ve got to feel that the implementation of a deadline is the story’s key incentive. In Angels, Langdon doesn’t really have time to disseminate all the possible esoteric knowledge he has on the subject (although that really doesn’t stop him from trying).

The book follows Langdon as he’s brought to a CERN particle physics lab in Geneva to decipher the meaning of behind the brand seared on the chest of a dead scientist. The brand is the perfectly symmetrical logo of the “Illuminati,” an ancient society of thinkers and scholars that have long been in opposition to the Church. But that’s where the mystery begins, as Langdon is shown a basement lab where actual, factual anti-matter’s been created, and the empty spot where the container with the largest quantity of anti-matter once sat. The plot leads to the Vatican, where somewhere, underneath the centuries’ old monuments, sits the anti-matter container 24-hours away from failure and the vaporization of the main seat of the Catholic Church.

Unfurling almost like a version of 24 where Jack Bauer is a nearly-ineffectual library nerd, Angels & Demons actually keeps things moving swift with a series of challenges, setbacks, shifting allegiances, dangerous consequences and new players. The deadline makes all the difference, and the fact that the stakes are higher in this one than just saving Langdon’s bacon from a false-murder rap. And another thing in reading Angels after Da Vinci is that it feels like Brown improved his formula from one to the other; as if the broad strokes that made Da Vinci and interesting read are slightly reformatted to make them bigger and more dangerous. But remember: Angels & Demons was written first.

Don’t get me wrong though, Angels & Demons is still a pot-boiler, a beach novel. Despite its some 700 pages, it goes by in a breeze and half of its rather forgotten moments after finishing the final page. However, there’s more here to build a real thriller around as opposed to The Da Vinci Code, where page upon page was just people sitting around talking about how to resolve stuff rather than actually resolving it. It’ll be interesting to see which way that Brown will go in the next Langdon adventure The Solomon Key; will it be an exciting field assignment like Angels, or another yarn chained to the legs of the library desk as if some kind of research assistant like Da Vinci? We’ll have to wait and see when and if Brown finishes it.

New Moon By Stephanie Meyer

This will be the big one, perhaps even rivalling Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for the prize of the year’s biggest book to film translation. But there are a couple of problems. First and foremost is the fact that Summit Entertainment’s rush to get this one before the cameras forced out Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke from the director’s chair. Now I’d never be so naïve to say that Hardwicke’s direction was the reason why so many seats were filled for Twilight, but I think it was her assured hand that elevated the film beyond sappy, teenage melodramatics. But the real test is that, for the most part, New Moon is practically Edward-less.

Working in New Moon’s favour is that much of it reads like a much more like a story than the insights into a teenage girl’s diary. Don’t get me wrong though, I think one of the things that works in favour of Twilight the book over Twilight the movie, is that we have that inner narration and the first-person perspective of Bella to help the syrupy romance go down without the vapid self-awareness of a romance novel. But where as Twilight was 400 pages of Bella swooning over Edward followed by about 100 pages of the fallout from running across James, the really bad vampire, New Moon has mystery, intrigue and a broader range of emotion.

Unfortunately you have to get past pages 100-200, which are all about how Bella walks around in a proto-zombie-like state after her beloved Edward departs, along with the rest of the Cullens, after a paper cut leads to some nearly typical vampire behaviour at Bella’s birthday party. But in her stupor, Bella reconnects with Jacob Black, a Native American boy from the reserve down the road from Forks. It eventually turns out that Jacob is the latest in a long line of werewolves, a revelation unsurprising given the story he tells Bella in Twilight that leads to her realization that Edward’s a vampire.

For anyone not wanting to read another 500 pages of how “perfect” Edward looks, rejoice in the fact that Bella spends much of the book taking Milhouse’s favourite drug of choice: repressall. Edward’s abandonment of her leaves Bella more than a little dark and disturbed. She tries some desperately dangerous things like learning how to ride a motorcycle and cliff-diving, and also wandering through the woods looking for the meadow she and Edward gazed lazily at each other, with a bear on the loose and everything. Of course the bear is really several werewolves who, surprise, don’t need the moon or night to change form.

But post-modern takes on classical monsters aside, New Moon gets more and more compelling as it ploughs forward past Bella’s doldrums and the risk-taking activity and into the very, real dangers presented by the return of some very unwelcomed faced in Forks. And then from there things really get interesting with a trip to Italy, some really old vampires and the return of Edward. While reading though, I wondered how much of this had Stephanie Meyers planned out in advanced and how much she’s flying without a net. Like the second Harry Potter book, The Chamber of Secrets, New Moon struggles between where it’s been and where it wants to go. But I will say that screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg was able to take less and make more with the original Twilight book, it should prove interesting what she can do with so much more in her tool kit on New Moon.