Half of a Yellow Sun v. The Road
presented by
SEMIFINALS
Half of a Yellow Sun
v. The Road
Judged by Elizabeth Gaffney
Elizabeth Gaffney the author of a novel, Metropolis, and the editor at large of the new magazine A Public Space. No connections to the authors in the contest, though she did meet Gary Shteyngart at a party once, where a lot of writers played a parlor game called Mafia. (She can’t remember if he was killed off very swiftly for extreme gullibility, or was it that he was the last villager standing, having absolutely no clue about the nefarious nature of the breastfeeding poetess next to him, who had stealthily slain his compatriots, each in their turn, and finally did him in too?)
What a pairing: two books about the near annihilation of a society—one on the global scale, one the local. One set in the future, one historical. One a relentless, bleak as bones father-and-son road story. The other a multiple-point-of-view, family/war saga that is leavened with sex and the copious aromas of daily life yet freighted with genocide and slaughter. The first by an established master, the second by an exciting young writer. Similar in ways, absolutely different in content and execution. Both good. Quite a pairing.
So, let me just say, before I go further, that it barely makes sense to have to compare them. It’s like choosing between death by atom bomb and death by machete. It’s like choosing between sisters (make that twin sisters). It’s like choosing whether to kill your own child or to let him be killed by a band of roving cannibals. It’s like choosing between breakfast and lunch. This was hard.
Half of a Yellow Sun follows three interrelated characters through their experiences in the 1967 Nigeria-Biafra War. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu goes to work as a houseboy for a pro-Biafra professor and is eventually drawn into the war against his will; Olanna, a wealthy young woman of Igbo descent, distances herself from her family when she takes up with that same radical professor. Richard, an Englishman whose interest in the art and history of the Igbo people is genuine but shrouded in colonialism, takes up with Olanna’s twin sister. All of them suffer devastating losses. In telling their stories, the book manages to convey a lot of information without seeming polemic. Moving but unsentimental, it is an achievement.
The Road in set in a terrain I last saw in a recurring nightmare I used to have in high school, back before the Cold War ended. The world lies adrift in ashes. Civilization is over. Most living things are dead. The few human survivors wander around desperately searching for sustenance. I was not eager to pick it up. It seemed way too dark. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there. But then, as the best books do, it showed me that I can love reading about a dreadful situation. I can enjoy the description of unspeakable horror, and in a cathartic way, not a sadistic one. I can find the company of unlikable characters irresistible. Thank God for literature. Art can be beautiful when its subject is not. It can make hell a place where we want to tarry, and that makes life here in Brooklyn a lot more livable.
I really like and admire Half of a Yellow Sun. I especially loved the sections that focus on Ugwu. His character is winning, even when he is at his personal worst, because he rings so true, he is so human. I felt transported in his sections, vicariously experiencing his naivety, his pride, his unvarnished intelligence, and his gradual, terrible acquisition of a kind of wisdom through exposure to the horrors of the war. In Olanna and Richard’s sections (some of the grizzliest and most dazzling, image by image), I was interested, too, yet somehow not gripped in quite the same way.
The Road is something else entirely. I stayed up all night reading it. I, who am not a softy, wept at the end. It made me want to change the world, to try to make sure it never comes to this. As a book, it’s awfully close to perfect. There is no sentence or word out of place. It is as well-crafted as a great poem, as riveting as any the most plot-oriented page-turner. I closed it with the thought that I would never forget it and the certainty that I would nevertheless want to reread it, both for the sentences and for the story.
And that is why The Road gets my vote for the Rooster.
Advancing:
Against the Day
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
WARNER: All right, they’ve worn me down. Based on its steady march through the field and the judges’ glowing (no post-apocalyptic nuclear radiation pun intended) reviews, I’m going to read The Road. I’ve been reluctant, though, because it sounds reminiscent of one of the seminal events in my life, an event that permanently altered my worldview.
That event? Watching the original airing of The Day After on television in fall of 1983. For those who have forgotten, or are too young to remember, The Day After was a hugely hyped, fairly groundbreaking (for television) film that saw Steve Guttenberg doing his best, and perhaps only, dramatic work. It’s set in Kansas immediately before and in the days following a “nuclear event.” In a U.S./U.S.S.R showdown, the trigger fingers get itchier and itchier until both sides engage in what the W.O.P.R. in WarGames would describe as Global Thermonuclear War.
The majority of the film is the aftermath of several detonations on a rural part of Kansas where we see the slow progression of radiation poisoning take down everyone from John Lithgow to JoBeth Williams to Jason Robards (all-star cast).
I was 13, exactly the wrong age to watch this film alone upstairs while my parents held a seasonal cocktail party downstairs. The wrong age because I was old enough to get that this shit was really possible and really fucking scary, but not old enough to process it in any kind of rational way. I experienced it, but couldn’t understand it.
In fact, if one were to ask me how I came to hold my present, generally liberal, political sensibilities, I could point to seeing that movie as a formative experience. It made me terrified of war, definitely a member of the “maybe not never, but for sure a very last resort,” camp. I couldn’t imagine that anyone could embrace the idea that exchanging nukes would be a good idea under any circumstances.
What most concerns me about our present administration is that I feel as though they don’t find the idea abhorrent. That in fact, it’s something that’s in play. Maybe the Cheney we perceive is caricature, but he feels like a guy who has his finger near the trigger. I wouldn’t want the trigger in the same state as me. Apparently Cormac McCarthy is the kind of guy who can imagine a post-trigger-pulled world. I certainly wouldn’t want to spend time writing that, and I’m not sure I want to spend time reading it, but dammit if they haven’t convinced me.
Due to the miracle of Netflix I recently re-watched The Day After. It’s not nearly as frightening now, mostly because 1983 makeup technology looks pretty cheesy now and seriously: Guttenberg in a dramatic role?
GUILFOILE: Who holds back the electric car? / Who made Steve Guttenberg a star?
It’s funny but I watched The Day After under similar circumstances, alone in my room while my parents were watching Murder She Wrote or some British sitcom on PBS. It freaked me out too. But I wonder if The Road would have had the same kind of resonance then as it does now. Or if it even could have been written. Back then, the most profound statements about nuclear apocalypse were being made on Kansas album covers. I think we’re better equipped to reflect on our anxiety about post-apocalypses of varying kinds.
In the meantime, over in the Book Bloggers’ Office Pool, Condalmo falters as Half of a Yellow Sun—his pick to go all the way—goes down. Powells’s Brockman vaults into the lead with his championing of The Road, and Shaken and Stirred also makes a move out of last place into fourth. With everyone dead in the next match (no bracket has either Against the Day or One Good Turn advancing), we wait for the Zombie Round to see who the real contenders will be in the finals.