The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 3 February 2009
by Edward Abbey
The angst is in the air. Global economic collapse has made people, at last, consider the dramatic cost of our capitalistic lifestyle. Not that this will lead to any great awakening of concern for our environment or our planet. Most likely, the desire is just to return to the insulated years of excess that have just passed. Despite our ever-growing awareness, few seem to realize that we are given, yet again, the opportunity to change our way of being in this world. With each such opportunity, the need to change becomes more dire. In the end, however, we may just destroy the planet, not through war, but through simple consumption. We will have merely consumed the planet and her resources, making the place virtually unlivable. In a few million years, or so, perhaps the ecosystem will have forgotten our gross irresponsibility. Perhaps not. Anyway, someday, sooner or later, there will be a reckoning and it seems unlikely we will be even remotely prepared for it. Into this landscape falls a multitude of post-apocalyptic novels. It is a venerable sub-genre. In 1980, Edward Abbey, famous for spawning a kind of eco-terrorism with his landmark The Monkeywrench Gang, came out with this novel, a brief picture of a blasted desert landscape and the blasted people who populate it. After a brief introduction, outlining the ecological collapse of the planet, we meet Jack and Sam, two men headed west across the desert to the ruins of a large city (which turns out to be Phoenix). Jack is in search of his long lost son, Charlie. Sam is Jack's sidekick, a Hopi Indian with shamanistic powers of hypnosis. The city is under the dictatorial control of the Chief, who leads an army in his goal of re-establishing the United States as a fascist nation with deluded dreams of traveling into space and reaching godhood. Abbey's depiction of the landscape is vivid and often beautiful, even his destroyed city. His portrayal of the social structure, however, is more simplified. There is the army, made up largely of conscripts. The city seems to have no other life than that of the military executing the people who oppose it. The rest of the population is made up of old men, old women, and small children, all of whom cower in burned out buildings. There is a small cadre of young people leading a revolt agains the Chief, though their numbers are reduced by daily hangings described by Abbey in almost fetishistic detail. And there is a motorcycle brigade, outlaw enforcers at the beck and call of the Chief. They are terrorists and torturers in the name of order. When Jack and Sam walk into town, they encounter Dixie, the erstwhile companion of the leader of the motorcyclists; Rodack, an old professor out to bring down the Chief and burn all the records so humanity can just start over from scratch; and the Chief himself, a megalomaniac obsessed with his sex organ. The story is a bit of a mess, with odd angles, dead ends, and loosely tied threads. Knowing Abbey, we can see with whom he most sympathizes, but he curiously gives the bad guys the most air time. We know more about their vision of a restoration of America's glory than we do about the people who want the dead nation to stay dead. The Chief, the torturing motorcyclist, a willing procuress, all these get more of a say than any of the opposition. It's an odd thing. We infer Abbey's point, but are left wondering just what he is getting at here. In the meantime, the writing is uneven. His descriptions of nature and the landscape are often sublime, but the dialogue is stilted, and the plot brutal and essentially unsatisfying. Still, the book has its points, not least of which another addition to the genre of literature that tries to warn us of where we are, in one way or another, inevitably headed.
Also by Abbey: [Desert Solitaire] [The Fool's Progress]