Book Review: Far North by Marcel Thereoux

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"Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city. Out on the far northern border of a failed state, Makepeace patrols the ruins of a dying city and tries to keep its unruly inhabitants in check. Into this cold, isolated world comes evidence that life is flourishing elsewhere - a refugee from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to take to the road to reconnect with human society. What Makepeace finds is a world unravelling, stockaded villages enforcing a rough and uncertain justice, mysterious slave camps labouring to harness the little understood technologies of a vanished civilization. But Makepeace’s journey also leads to unexpected human contact, tenderness, and the dark secrets behind this frozen world."

***

For all intents and purposes, the world has ended. The thunderous rush of the river of existence, once so teeming with men and birds and beasts - life in all its myriad shapes and sizes - has slowed to be as a mere stream, and died down, in time, to but a trickle. An experimental colony on the Russian tundra, built away from the hustle and bustle of modern, immoral civilisation, has lasted the course longer than most, yet even that oxbow of humanity has dried up. Makepeace Hatfield walks the ice-packed streets of Evangeline alone: the last of her family, the last in her humble village, the last, she fears, of all.

But Makepeace, named in celebration of her parents' "new religious enthusiasm," is not alone - though soon enough she might wish she were - for out on patrol one day, she comes across Ping, an escaped slave, and though tragedy comes shortly thereafter, a spark of hope catches in her heart regardless. And so she leaves all that she has known behind to set out into the great beyond, determined to find the last surviving remnants of a society she'd long thought lost, and her place in it.

How to talk about Far North without referencing that other post-apocalyptic masterpiece? If you've read The Road - and at this point, who hasn't? - you'll struggle not to feel its reverberations throughout Marcel Theroux's fourth novel, but that isn't to say Far North lacks a sense of identity. There have been narratives set at the end of the world before, and there will be many more, no doubt. The Road, though, has such traction these days, such immutable cultural currency, that it stands as a touchstone for many to measure fiction which shares with it a setting against. Far North is not the equal of Cormac McCarthy's bleak tour-de-force in populist terms, then, nor stylistically speaking, but just as we do not expect every instance of film to equal Citizen Kane in either execution or appeal, neither should we thus overlook post-apocalyptic fiction simply because it is not The Road.

In point of fact, Far North has the potential to reach farther even than that oft-touted powerhouse. To begin with, Theroux's latest and surely greatest novel is more accessible than the Oprah favourite by half. His spare prose engenders an equally haunting atmosphere as that which pervades The Road - without relying, as McCarthy does, on literary sleight of hand. And while The Road left its readers feeling hopeless, bereft even, Far North is ultimately a much more uplifting experience. I wouldn't dare spoil the fantastic denouement, nor suggest that everyone escapes it unscathed; suffice it to say that Theroux has crafted an end of the world narrative more about the world that its end, the journey than the destination. In place of the grays and browns is a pristine landscape of colour, feeling and promise, a truly beautiful thing to behold.

It would be lamentably easy to dismiss Theroux's novel out of hand as a repurposing of The Road with its anonymous man and boy and substituted for a woman and a girl - a sort of feminine spin on the post-apocalytic machismo of McCarthy's powerhouse - but there's a great deal more to Far North than such a reductive description allows for. Its scope is greater, its heart easier to hone in on, its setting that much more original and affecting than the standard scenario of a washed-out, once-wonderful world. In Makepeace, Theroux gives us a narrator we can believe in, with a history that has shaped her and a future that makes her. She is a revelatory guide through a timeless landscape that guards rapturous surprise at every turn.

Far North has already garnered a nomination for the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke award, and though The City and the City beat it to the punch, one suspects it was overlooked largely because so many readers believe the setting that defines its oeuvre has been mined to the point of exhaustion. But there are more ways than one for the world to end, and believe you me, you'll want to see this one.

***

Far North

by Marcel Theroux

June 2010, Faber & Faber

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Book Review: Mr Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett

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"It is the time of the Great Depression. The dustbowl has turned the western skies red and thousands leave their homes seeking a better life. Marcus Connelly seeks not a new life, but a death - a death for the mysterious scarred man who murdered his daughter.

"And soon he learns that he is not alone. Countless others have lost someone to the scarred man. They band together to track him, but as they get closer, Connelly begins to suspect that the man they are hunting is more than human. As the pursuit becomes increasingly desperate, Connelly must decide just how much he is willing to sacrifice to get his revenge."

***

Mr Shivers represents the most impressive horror fiction debut since Joe Hill made his big break with the wonderfully wicked Heart-Shaped Box. In point of fact, though bleaker by half, Robert Jackson Bennett's first novel is a more memorable experience than even that.

There. I've said it.

With the blurb behind me, I turned the first few pages of Mr Shivers not knowing quite what to expect. My first thought was a simple, bloody revenge thriller, but soon enough it came clear that Bennett's debut was as much an unsettling tale of the macabre as that, or perhaps a careful character study of a man reeling from an awful loss. Or indeed, a mythic road-trip set against the crimson-tinged dustbowl of the Great Depression. But Mr Shivers is none of those things in isolation, though its narrative takes in every one and more besides. It defies description. It defies even its too-often degenerate genre. It is, and by a large margin, the best novel I've read in 2010 thus far.

That it's Bennett's first only startles me all the more. His is a voice that bleeds confidence: precise and assured, he spins his tale directly, with little of the digression and obfuscation many new novelists lean upon to disguise their uncertainty. We meet Connelly, a man devastated by the untimely death of his daughter, and learn of his vengeful intent; he comes upon a hodgepodge of other lost souls, each wronged in their own way by the scarred man in gray Connelly hunts; and together, the hobo gang trudge through the endless trail of death and destruction the enigmatic Mr Shivers leaves in his wake.

Mr Shivers is in many respects a rather straightforward novel. From the first chapter to the last, there is a clear, perfectly paced throughline that keeps the narrative tense. The object of Connelly's hatred never seems far away, and so the reader is drawn from encounter to encounter feeling always that the explosive showdown between these two men - not so dissimilar in character and purpose as they might think - is sure to come soon. When inevitably Connelly and his disparate companions do approach the end of their deadly pilgrimage, readers will have long felt its desperate pull - inexorable, awful and awesome all at once.

Connelly is a brilliantly laconic character, terse and deadly, demented by the death of his daughter, a "future and a life violently aborted without even a cry to mark its passing from the world." On his journey he comes upon a motley assortment of kindred spirits which sing with the same raw passion: a pitiable fortune teller, a fallen man of the Lord, a woman faced with a quandary much like his own. The most haunting of all the characters in Mr Shivers, however, has to be its evocative setting against a decaying America which writhes against the sky with all the horror of a ball of breeding snakes. Bennett's debut is, in its way, a song for a dying earth; a lament to a moment in our history "which they all now felt was penultimate. They lived in a dead and dying age. Already they were but memories for the future."

Bennet's prose is exquisite, sparse and poetic, dripping with the sort of sacred profanity Crooked Little Vein writer Warren Ellis has made his stock and trade. In the last act, the gray man explains that he has "stood on the edge of the world and pissed into nothingness. I've seen the things that hide and dance behind the stars in the sky and I pinned them to the ground and laughed and made them tell me their names one by one." Mr Shivers is shot through, too, of nuggets of hobo wisdom, such as the "only thing that's worse than a thing that don't work is a thing that almost works" and, on law and America, "If it's going to tell me what to do and what not to do, it better be on hand... This is just dirt we're standing on, son. Dirt and stone. Ain't no lines in the earth."

Mr Shivers is bleak, mythic and bloody: the most thrilling novel of its ouvre since The Road. In fact, the two narratives have a great deal in common, although the veins of genre certainly run deeper in Mr Shivers than in Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer prizewinner. But then, as the preacher says, "sometimes the road goes through places that are... not normal. The road is more than just dirt."

Robert Jackson Bennett is a staggeringly persuasive argument for the infinite possibilities of the horror novel and his debut is a landmark for the genre. Mr Shivers will take your breath away.

***

Mr Shivers

by Robert Jackson Bennett

January 2010, Orbit

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Recommended and Related Reading

Film Review: The Road

What to say about The Road? What to say about a book that touched its every reader that hasn't been iterated and reiterated a hundred times before, in a thousand different ways?

Like so many literary sorts, genre fans familiar with apocalyptic fiction as like as regular old souls who like a good tale to take to bed with them, Cormac McCarthy's landmark last novel left me speechless, breathless, hopeless. A short, sharp shock of a story, The Road told of a man and a boy clinging to one another at the end of the world. With every other sliver of hope lost to them, they go South, towards the sea; towards nowhere in particular and everything, all at once.

The man and the boy, on the road. McCarthy never names them, denies them, in fact, their identities in every sense but that which they derive from one another. They come across all manner of horrors left behind by the unnamed calamity that has made a hollow ruin of our Earth. Cannibals, thieves and animals are the least of it: mostly, the man and the boy encounter the eternal struggle for survival that life has become in the form of hunger. If they have any hope of reaching the end of the endless road, they must, of course, eat, except that untold years have passed since the world ended. There is little food left for them to scavenge.

Counter-intuitively, perhaps, for all the misery and isolation of McCarthy's Pulitzer prizewinner, it was, in the end, an uplifting sort of story. For all the cruel tragedy within its pages, The Road had a tender heart; for all its harsh reality, McCarthy wrote his simple, striking narrative with a soft touch.