Mic Breaks Only discussion

***Open discussion of THE WHOLE BOOK below, no spoilers needed. Be sure you have finished the book before reading any further! Note: if this is your first visit to this topic I recommend you read this post about discussion ideas, then skip down and post your initial response, then read and respond to other people's posts.***

At the very least check in here when you finish and tell us if you enjoyed the novel. I'll post specific discussion ideas below, along with the general topics we've seen repeated throughout the book.

Full Book discussions:

1) Would you say this novel aged like a fine wine or was it corked?

2) Did the survivors actions in the aftermath make sense in the amount of time that passes in the book?

General Discussions:

1) Share your favorite quote(s) from the final section of the book.

2) Share your favorite word(s) from the final section of the book.

3) Who was your favorite or most intriguing character?


GO!

The nose knows: I commend the authors for trying (and to the best of my knowledge succeeding) to detail the physical impact on the earth of a massive comet strike. This part of the book might work today as well as it did in 1977.

I like to think that this book would not be critically or popularly accepted in today's market. I want to start with a criticism that has less to do with a modern view then the others, then I'll move back to the question at hand.

Most of the story is predicated on the idea that humanity knew the comet was going to pass near Earth but never calculating that it would actually hit us. I call baloney - this was a major contrivance used to simplify and move the story forward. This is significant to this discussion because this authorial decision taints the rest of the book since it potentially changes almost every characters actions before the event.

This book seeps with prejudice. We take it as fact that most women will simply be frail and die immediately. Black people turn into cannibals in about one week. The issues are pervasive and the exceptions (a strong woman, a black astronaut) only serve to pinpoint the horrible portrayal of these groups of people.

My umbrage continues as the authors chose to simplify humanities' reaction into a sort of Lord of the Flies mockery. Golding used children in his classic because they are not yet affected by societal norms and haven't formed an understanding of morality. Replicating this type of reaction is nonsensical as humans have shown (throughout time) that they will work to build society over anarchy. In Hammer the story is told from the stance that humans default to anarchy and overcoming that is heroic.

I am not postulating that humanity will all get together and resolve impossible problems with cooperation and love. My position is that the New Brotherhood would never amass such numbers as it would implode onto itself. There are countless novels that provide a more compelling and believable post apocalyptic society. The core of my frustration is that the authors chose to make the largest struggle in the book is not the comet itself (which was interesting) but instead a contrived war between survivors (boring).

In an earlier topic I brought up The Stand, another book which suffers some similar problems. I will give King credit for not pushing prejudices as far and for creating a much more compelling post-disaster battle. Unfortunately I think both books are "corked" for the modern reader.

Time: The authors choose an extremely condensed time line after the comet strike - nine weeks followed by the final showdown. The themes urging the survivors onward include food shortages and the ever present "winter is coming".

The plot gets bogged down with love... quadrilaterals. As the world burns most of the characters spend their time having sex or fretting about who's having sex. There are subplots like the boyscout troop which read like a rejected letter to a men's magazine.

Our group of survivors also makes some huge logical leaps that leave them believing they are most likely the strongest surviving group alive. This seems bizarre considering they are one of the worst hit areas in the continental United States. Al Hardy conveniently writes off the Midwest: "With all that rain, I'd think the Midwest is drowned out - no crops, no transportation, lots of people starving." I would think that the lack of major earthquakes and tidal waves and better preparation (due to average weather patterns) would make people in the Midwest much better prepared for the aftermath.

As the book continues the feats of the Jellison survivor group become more and more outlandish. Ranch improvements jump from manually smashing rocks to clear fields to underground heating systems powered by sewage in the blink of an eye. Bigamy becomes normal practice in less than three months.

These few observations are the tip of the iceberg related to plot gaps and confounding human reactions in this book. I think that the survivor's situation is silly - but the authors had to push the time frame because it only gets less realistic if more time is allowed to pass. Everything about the human reaction to the event feels contrived.

Quotes: The wind acted like a horde of catnip-maddened kittens.

There were weekly prizes for the best rat catchers: some of the last candy bars in the world. This illustrates a frequent meme in this book: The last of x in the world. Silliness presented as fact.

Harvey sat staring at the empty glass. Finally he stood and threw it to the carpet. Psst - that's ONE OF THE LAST GLASSES IN THE WORLD.

I was brought up to hate poison gas. Unlike Bob who's parents had him huffing poison gas since he was two!

Finally, a whiskey quote: He drank from the glass, and waited a minute while the whiskey worked its ancient magic. This book made me crave some ancient magic.

Words: onliest (typo or a bad attempt at ebonics?), druthers, pluperfect, Fimbulwinter.

Character: Dan Forrester. Everyone else gets extra hate for not letting him kill one goat a month.

This book is CORKED, and while trying to open it, the cork actually disintegrated into 25 very small pieces and is floating in the rotten wine. If I was an alcoholic, I wouldn't even bother straining out the cork in order to stop my delirium tremens. I would throw the whole kit and caboodle away.

That being said, my primary frustration was with the level of sexism and racism contained in the book. African Americans for the most part became a cannibal tribe that ate people for ritual, not for survival. Women were generally not of much use unless they were serving tea and crumpets, "marrying" multiple male partners, or being sent out as expendable forces against the cannibal army. Most women in the world didn't even survive the comet strike.

The juxtaposition of the very detailed and descriptive parts relative to the comet as opposed to exceptionally feeble caricatures of people did not make any sense to me. It was like reading a short paragraph of Scientific American followed by the script for a daytime soap opera, it didn't mesh very well.

I didn't find the immediate degradation of society particularly believable. I would expect pillaging, violent crimes, a play for societal power, and hoarding of resources (particularly food). I wouldn't expect Boy Scouts to pair off with Girl Scouts in an odd Appalachian type of commune. I also wouldn't expect polygamy and cannibalism to be a natural sudden course of humanity.

I was particularly confused by a scene where Maureen Jellison was lying in bed recalling the battle from the day before. She gets out of bed, walks to "town" and starts describing things like an advanced sewage treatment system that heats the hospital, city hall, and in turn makes fertilizer. The last time we had seen the Stronghold, it was trying to make greenhouses and people were primarily working on manually moving rocks from fields. It seemed like we had jumped a significant amount of time in a matter of days or weeks. It was wholly unbelievable especially when most of the manpower of the Stronghold had been diverted to making advanced chemical weapons for the upcoming battle.


My favorite quotes included "If I thought enough to sleep with you, I sure as hell had to save your life, didn't I?"

"His hands were warm on her back, and he smelled like sweat and work; an hones smell, not something from a spray can."

"Being a faithful-well, very nearly faithful-married man for eighteen years is not much preparation for romance."

"Harry and I are both married to Donna, used to be Donna Adams. Her mother raised pluperfect hell about that."..."The arrangement made sense, with Harry out on his rounds for weeks at a time. Someone had to work the Chicken Ranch while Harry was out."


My favorite words included: flippantly conventional, conscripted, broodingly, druthers, collie-dog eyes, grimmer, brevet lieutenant, mimeographed, tarpaulin, and choleric.


My favorite character has to be Leonilla Alexandrovna Malik, M.D., physician and kosmonaut, for being the only woman out of twelve listed in the Dramatis Personae that did not suck. By the end of the story, she had gone to space, returned to earth successfully, and was still a physician working in a hospital. Also, I don't recall her mentioning "marriage" in order to survive once.