George R.
Stewart's 1949 novel Earth Abides opens with protagonist
Isherwood Williams, a geography grad student doing field work for his thesis in
the woods around the San Francisco Bay, getting bitten by a rattlesnake and
refusing to panic. Keeping his focus, he stops to pick up an old hammer he
found along the way. Recuperating in a nearby cabin, he finds the hammer
"occupied an unduly large part of his consciousness":
It
had been used by some miner in the old days when rock-drills were driven home
in a low tunnel with a man swinging a hammer in one hand; four pounds was about
the weight a man could handle in that way, and it was called a single-jack
because it was managed one-handedly.
In a novel
that otherwise has little use for the supernatural, this fever dream serves as
a portent. Isherwood will hold onto that hammer longer than he suspects.
Making his way
out of the wilderness post-recovery, Isherwood discovers that an eerie calm has
fallen over a nearby farm. Then he finds the calm stretches everywhere he
travels, since humanity has largely been wiped out by a fast-acting plague.
With little more than a hammer and a car, Isherwood returns to his parents'
home on San Lupo Drive in an unnamed but easily recognizable Berkeley (where Stewart
was an English professor). Nobody's home. Difficult-to-faze, Isherwood sets out
to find other survivors with little luck, discovering only a soon-to-die drunk,
a couple made up of a sexually inviting woman and a threatening man, and a
teenage girl who flees in terror. Leaving California, he sets off to explore
the rest of America, and finds that it's mostly his. There are survivors here
and there—an African-American family group in the South, a pair of New
Yorkers who drink warm martinis for breakfast—but most everyone else has
gone. The future, as blank as it looks, belongs to him. So he decides to go
home. "There'll always be a San Lupo Drive!" he thinks, without yet realizing
that with no one there to call it that, there's no such thing as San Lupo Drive
or anyplace else.
Isherwood is an
unlikely architect for a new tomorrow. He isn't exactly a misanthrope, but Stewart
establishes early on that his protagonist doesn't have a lot of use for other
people. Or dogs, even. But he overcomes his distrust of the latter when he
takes on a canine partner named Princess. And in time, he brings a few stray
people into his circle as well, beginning with a slightly older woman named Em,
with whom he begins a relationship founded as much on genuine affection as,
well, the absence of anyone else around.
Their
relationship also transcends old prejudices:
"You're
just a nice boy," [she said]. "You looked at my hands and said they were nice.
You never even noticed the blue in the half-moons."
He felt the
shock, and he knew that she felt the shock in him. Now everything came together
in his mind—brunette complexion, dark liquid eyes, full lips, white
teeth, rich voice, accepting temperament.
I had to read
that passage a few times to confirm that it said what I thought it said, and I still
wasn't entirely sure until I hit a later moment in which Em referred to the
enslavement of her African ancestors. (Note that the cover of the 1962 edition
keeps the miscegenation squarely on the page.)
Much of the
rest of the novel concerns Ish and Em's almost accidental (and frequently
unsuccessful) attempts to rebuild civilization. They find other survivors and
eventually form a social group known as The Tribe, but most of the old ways
don't transfer to the next generation, even though everyone lives off the
scraps of civilization that came before. Prone to worry, Ish sees a future of
ill-adapted humans who know only how to forage for cans.
I'm torn about
discussing the rest of the novel, because I don't want to spoil the plot,
especially since I really loved this book in a way I hadn't expected. My copy
came with raves from The New Yorker and Carl Sandburg ("I
thank brother Stewart for writing it"), but I wasn't expecting such an
engrossing, and in the end extraordinarily moving novel. It's still in print,
too, so anyone who wants to experience it with surprises intact should skip
down to the bolded "End Spoilers" part. Ready? Okay.
Stewart writes
in a style that's beautifully free of ornamentation, letting the mood build
slowly from the details of Ish's day-to-day existence, and the way those
details change as he moves from being a loner to a leader of humanity. But
anyone expecting a reiteration of humanism and a slow return to the old ways
will be disappointed. Stewart maintains a clear-eyed skepticism of humanity.
Ish and Em and a few others live together happily in mutually beneficial
anarchy, but in time, thanks to a threatening newcomer, they have to form a
state body. Which goes hand-in-hand with the shedding of blood.
Even before
that, Ish finds that the generation that knows only the echoes of what have
come to be known as "the Old Times" has little use for math or literacy or even
most music. (They do enjoy the sport of bull-dodging, however.) Ish makes no
attempts to preserve religion, but he becomes, in the end, a kind of god. And
that hammer seen in the opening pages becomes a symbol of his godhood, a
symbolic repository for the mysteries of the civilization that was. He isn't,
however, a much-feared god, as an elderly Ish discovers in the novel's closing
chapters:
"Where
shall we go, Ish?" one of them asked. Ish felt that this was a strange question
for anyone to ask of him, who was only an old man and would scarcely know what
to do as well as the young ones would. Then he remembered that they sometimes
asked him which direction they should take for their hunting. When he did not
answer, they pinched him. He did not like to be pinched, and so he thought hard
now, as to which way they should go.
It's hard to fear
a deity who can't pinch back, and if any of his tribesmen ever thought him
immortal, they realize otherwise by the book's closing pages, when his death is
imminent and his tribe is desperate for him to appoint a successor and yield up
his hammer. He fades away knowing that humanity is, maybe for better and maybe
for worse, rebuilding civilization among the weeds and the rust, most likely in
a way that will bring on the same familiar cycles of war and competition. But
he also comes to realize that world itself is bigger than anything they might
build, and the novel finds that transcendence and skepticism don't necessarily
exclude each other. He finds hope of the most fundamental and unsentimental
kind in the words that make up the title.
END
SPOILERS
Again, this is
a terrific book. Stewart lets civilization crumble, and uses that scenario as
means of discovering how much of what he consider human is in fact a product of
our surroundings and centuries of custom. But it's no mere intellectual
exercise, and Isherwood's progress from gifted (though not extraordinarily so),
young man to leader to relic is believably realized and unexpectedly affecting.
It's also unpredictable. Stewart's book is an early post-apocalyptic novel, and
an influential one—Stephen King cites it as an influence on The
Stand—but it isn't the birthplace of the genre's clichés. I
kept expecting barbarian bikers to show up, or the plague to be revealed as the
work of a shadowy conspiracy, but neither makes an appearance. When an outside
threat does arrive, it's much more insidious, and it exacts a terrible toll
that's as much psychic as physical. It's also removed from the unrelenting
darkness of more modern post-apocalyptic visions, like Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Michael Haneke's Time Of The
Wolf. There just aren't enough people left to make the earth hell for
one another. Yet.
Much more time
is spent exploring the change in the local flora, and the sudden rise and fall
in the local rat population. But though Stewart writes with little flash, he's
never boring. He chooses the few details he needs to get the point of a scene
across, he uses them well, and he lets a distinct point of view—humane
without being in awe of humanity, and skeptical without being cynical—emerge
from the undergrowth. It's a long requiem that leaves no doubt that what's come
before has been laid to rest. And he lets readers decide whether that's worth
mourning.
* * * *
That might be enough heavy stuff for a
while. How about we try a Cold War farce and barbarians for a couple of weeks?
Next:
The Mouse That
Roared by Leonard Wibberley
Then:
Wolfshead by Robert
E. Howard