The Road - Cormac McCarthy

THE WRITER

McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933. His family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in 1937. He is the third of six children, with three sisters and two brothers. He attended Knoxville Catholic High School.
McCarthy went to the University of Tennessee during 1951-1952 and was a liberal arts major. In 1953, he joined the USAir Force for four years, two of which he spent in Alaska where he hosted a radio show. In 1957, he returned to the University of Tennessee. During his time in college, he published two stories in a student paper and won several writing awards. In 1961, he and fellow university student Lee Holleman were married and had their son Cullen. He left university without earning a degree and moved to Chicago where he wrote his first novel. His marriage ended and he returned to Tennessee.
McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published by Random House in 1965. At Random House, the manuscript found its way to Albert Erskine, who had been William Faulkner´s editor. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy for the next twenty years.
In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy met Anne DeLisle, a singer who became his second wife. McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark. Afterward the couple returned to America. He went on to write Child of God and Suttree.
Supporting himself with the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship, he wrote his next novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, which was published in 1985. The book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles. In a 2006 poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld.
McCarthy finally received widespread recognition in 1992 with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award and was followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, the two subsequent books in a Western trilogy. McCarthy's next book, 2005's No Country for Old Men, stayed with the western setting and themes yet moved to a more contemporary period. It was adapted into a film of the same name by the Coen Brothers. McCarthy's latest book, The Road, was published in 2006, winning international acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for literature. A film adaptation was released on November 25, 2009.


THE ROAD

The Road follows an unnamed father and son journeying together across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some time after a great, unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and almost all life on Earth. Realizing that they will not survive another winter, the father leads the boy South, through a desolate American landscape along a vacant highway, towards the sea. They are sustained only by the vague hope of finding warmth and more "good people" like them, and carrying with them only what is on their backs and what will fit into a damaged supermarket cart.
Because of falling ash, the setting is very cold and dark and the land is devoid of living vegetation. There is frequent rain, snow, and storms. Most of the few human survivors are cannibalistic and/or nomads, scavenging for human flesh. Their presence is noted by their leavings, mutilated and/or decorated skulls.
The father coughs blood every morning and knows he is dying, yet he struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation, as well as from what he sees as the boy's innocently well-meaning, but dangerous desire to help wanderers they meet. Through much of the story, the pistol they carry for protection or suicide has only one bullet. The boy has been told to use it on himself if capture is imminent, to spare himself the horror of death at the hands of the cannibals.
In the face of these obstacles, the man and the boy have only each other (they are "each the other's world entire"). The man maintains the pretense, and the boy holds on to the real faith, that there is a core of ethics left somewhere in humanity. They repeatedly assure one another that they are "the good guys," who are "carrying the fire."


QUESTIONS THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

Why are the father and son unnamed in the book?
Is The Road science fiction, a dystopia or simply a story of good versus evil?
¨You're not the one who has to worry about everything.The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said. He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one."
What does the boy represent in the book?

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

THE WRITER

Aldous Huxley was an essayist and novelist whose reputation reached its peak in the 1920's. Well known for his essays and novels, he also wrote poetry, journalism, historical studies, travel works, screenplays, and short stories. Brave New World (1932) is probably his most well-known novel, though he did publish many other novels of intellectual and critical success such as Antic Hay (1923), Point Counter Point (1928), and Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

Huxley was born into an intellectual family in Laleham, England, in 1894. He was sent to a ´prep´ school and then to Eton. His father, Leonard Huxley, taught and later worked and wrote for a publishing firm, and his mother, Julia Frances Arnold Huxley, founded a girls' school. His aunt, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, was a successful novelist, and his great-uncle the poet Matthew Arnold, who wrote "Dover Beach."

Huxley was the third of four children, all considered brilliant. Yet the gifted household suffered a number of tragedies which would later shape his life and work. His mother Julia died of cancer in 1908 when he was just fourteen. Two years later, he contracted an eye disease which left him nearly blind for eighteen months, ending his budding scientific or medical career. In 1914, his brother Trevenen committed suicide.

Point Counter Point (1928) is one of Huxley´s most complex novels, and it is the novel that established him as a best-selling author. Brave New World was to follow. He began Brave New World as a result of his intrigue with the sciences, which he had studied extensively. He was concerned with the social and moral ramifications of advances in science, medicine, and technology and the government responsibility. Although the novel can be read purely as science fiction, there is a deeper commentary reflecting Huxley's concern with technology and its place in society. The commentary on the potentially diverging paths of social and scientific progress continued into his later novels and essays.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

The novel opens in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, in the years A.F., or After Ford. Ford is the God-surrogate that many citizens of the World State believe is also Freud, the controversial psychosexual psychologist. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is leading a tour group of young students around a lab. He explains the scientific process by which human beings are fertilized and custom-made, and shows them the Social Predestination room, where workers create the social castes. They pass onto the conditioning rooms, where they reinforce the caste divisions by sleep-teaching.

The characters live in a socially engineered and hedonistic world, where the approved drug Soma gets rid of negative emotions, doubts and ideals to ensure that people are happy and have no reason not to confirm to society. They listen to synthetic music, self-medicate and have purely recreational sex, divorced from strong emotions or commitments. People are made, not born, and the bonds between mother and child are broken.

The central character, Bernard, has doubts about the brave new world he lives in and attempts to express some of his more subversive views to Lenina, who is unreceptive, if not distressed, and who encourages him to soothe and distract himself with soma and sex.

When he and Lenina go to The Savage Reservation, where people live outside the norms of the World State, Lenina shudders at the unclean conditions. They meet John, ¨The Savage¨, who tells his story to Bernard. It turns out that he is the illegitimate son of the Director and Linda, a woman who disappeared twenty-five years ago.

Bernard reveals the story on his return. The three then meet with Mustapha Mond and speak of religion. Mond says that there is a choice between machinery, scientific medicine, and universal happiness-- or God.

John flees, planning to become independent, but becomes famous as the subject of a documentary film and can find no way out. He self harms and kills himself in the context of the rioting and orgies that close the novel.

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

What sacrifices does a world of ´universal happiness´ demand?

To what extent is Huxley´s world influenced by Freudian and Jungian theories?

Is Huxley´s novel prophetic? In what ways are many of its situations quite contemporary?

A Room with a View - E.M.Forster

THE AUTHOR

E.M.Forster was born in England in 1879 and died there in 1970. He attended King´s College at the University of Cambridge. There he was active in a discussion group, many of whose members were later closely or loosely connected with ´The Bloomsbury Group.´ After coming down from Cambridge, he travelled extensively, first with his mother, with whom he shared a house until her death in 1945, and later with a close friend. He went to Egypt, worked for a time in India and wrote novels, essays and criticism.

His novels fall into several categories, reflecting his travel and personal experiences, but all share his belief in the potential of human love to conquer class and cultural barriers. The ´Italian´ novels (Where Angels Fear to Tread and Room with a View) the ´English´ novels (Howard´s End and Maurice) and his masterpiece, A passage to India , all brilliantly explore the encounters of people whose culture, class, gender, sexuality and temperament differ. At times, their inability to understand each other is merely comic, at others tragic, but always subtly rendered and with great compassion.

Forster was a conscientious objector during the First World War and declined the offer of a knighthood in 1949, always retaining his intellectual independence. Living at a time when homosexual relationships were illegal and books such as Radcliffe Hall´s The Well of Loneliness were actually banned, Forster nevertheless wrote novels informed by his own experiences and feelings. Above all, he wrote novels which explore the contrast between sexual relationships as conventional social arrangements (´good marriages´) and as passionate and authentic love affairs.

Forster died in 1970 at the Manchester home of his long term friend and lover and the latter´s wife, perhaps demonstrating with his own life the possibility of love to ´´conquer all.´´

ROOM WITH A VIEW

Room with a View is Forster´s most comic, romantic and optimistic novel, with a wonderful cast of eccentric characters and it has remained the most popular of all his novels. The protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, is a likeable romantic heroine; in spite, or perhaps because, of all her faults.

The novel opens in a pension in Florence, where, seeing Lucy´s disappointment in not having a room with a view, George Emerson and his father offer her their room. Aunt Charlotte, Lucy´s chaperone, reluctantly agrees but continues to suspect the radical politics of father and son. A spontaneous kiss between the two young people leads to Lucy being hastily bundled off to Rome and England by her aunt. We later find her engaged to the pompous Cecil Vyse, who hopes to mould Lucy into the perfect bride. However Cecil´s snobbish disdain for her family, along with the reappearance of George in their village, lead Lucy to break off her engagement, even though she is not completely aware of her own motives in doing so. The novel ends with Lucy choosing the possibility of lifelong love and growth with the partner of her choice, but with the dark possibility that she will not be ´forgiven´ by either family or society.

Room with a view is a wonderful portrait of English village life at the turn of the 20^th century, a comic depiction of Edwardian manners and an exploration of self-delusion, family obligations and romantic love.

QUESTIONS WHILE READING

How does Forster highlight the differences between George and Cecil? What social forces do they represent?

To what extent is Italy (and the English characters´ perceptions of Italy) important to the novel?

How are people connected and divided in the novel? What are their criteria for connecting?

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

THE WRITER

Harper Lee was born in 1926 and grew up in the Southern town of Monroeville, Alabama during segregation. She attended Huntingdon College and then studied law at the University of Alabama, writing short stories for campus magazines about racial injustice, a taboo subject at that time. She also spent a year at Oxford University as an exchange student.

In 1950, Lee moved to New York, where she worked as a reservation clerk for an airline company and soon began writing essays and sketches about people in Monroeville. A literary editor she found through her friend and fellow writer, Truman Capote, advised her to leave her job and concentrate on writing. In 1959, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcombe, Kansas, as a research assistant for Capote's classic 'non-fiction' novel In Cold Blood (1966).

Lee spent two and a half years writing To Kill a Mockingbird, at one point becoming so frustrated that she tossed the manuscript out the window into the snow! Her agent made her retrieve it. The book was published in 1960 but the editorial team at Lippincott warned Lee that she would probably sell only several thousand copies. Instead the book became one of the best-selling novels of all time, nationally and internationally, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961.

In 1964, virtually the last time she gave interviews, Lee recalled that she hoped only for encouragement. The ¨quick, merciful death" she expected from reviewers never came and the book has never been out of print, since its first publicaton. In spite of the novel´s success, Lee did not continue her literary career, although she worked for years on a second novel and a book of nonfiction. She returned from New York to Monroeville, where she has lived with her sister Alice ever since.

In 2007, Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by George Bush.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

The characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbours and the plot on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.

The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with serious issues of rape and racial injustice. The narrator's father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explained the novel's impact by writing, "in the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America.¨ However Atticus (based on Lee´s father) is not a campaigner for racial equality, but, more than anything, someone who upholds the principle of ´´equality before the law.¨ and human decency.

The trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman, whom no one but Atticus is willing to defend in the Alabama of the 30s, is at the heart of the novel´s action and acts as a lightning rod for an examination of the racial and class prejudices of the South. There are no easy solutions and the truth does not change the fate of Tom Robinson, who is convicted anyway and later murdered.

However courage is defined in the novel as fighting even though you may have lost before you start and is as important in small things as in big. Atticus also marks the contrast between the good and bad father in the novel and between parental authority won by modeling integrity and respect for others and parental power exercised over children through bullying and abuse. Calpurnia is also a model of dignity and courage, who provides context and structure in the children´s lives.

However the point of view is that of the child, Scout, and the story is told amid her own playground battles for her integrity and self-respect. Scout is one of the most likeable children in fiction, perhaps because she gets to tell her own story without cant, inspiring affection and respect for her guts and character.

Some critics have identified Boo Radley as the mockingbird of the title and Scout´s moral progress as defined by her attitude towards him – from using him for her private games to finally respecting his mysterious humanity.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

The book is widely taught in English speaking classrooms in lessons that examine equality and justice. Yet the book has always been controversial as a school text and its presence in public libraries has been challenged since its publication. How have the grounds for challenge changed? In which ways was/is the novel ´´unsuitable´´ for children?

Critics have noted that the book is far more popular with white than with black readers. Although the villains are white, so are the heroes. Are the black characters portrayed in the same depth and with the same degree of agency as the white characters? Or are they portrayed as passive victims?

Scout resists the pressure to become a ´´ Southern lady´´ Who are her role models? What kind of woman do you think she will become?

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

The Author

Mark Haddon was born in 1962 in Northampton and took a degree in English at Merton College Oxford. He is a poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter. Haddon is particularly known as a writer for children, especially for his series of Agent Z books, one of which, Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars, was made into a 1996 Children's BBC sitcom. He also wrote the screenplay for the BBC television adaptation of Raymond Briggs' story Fungus the Bogeyman.. In 2007 he wrote the BBC television drama Coming Down the Mountain.

In 2003, Haddon won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and in 2004, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best First Book for his first adult novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, even though his agent also marketed the book as a novel for young adults. Haddon's knowledge of Asperger syndrome comes from his work with autistic people as a young man. However he has said that he did not set out to write a novel about the syndrome, rather that the ´voice´ he needed to tell the story turned out to be the voice of a boy with the syndrome.

Haddon is a vegetarian and describes himself as a 'hard-line atheist'. In an interview with The Observer, Haddon said "I am atheist in a very religious mould". He lives in Oxford with his wife, Dr Sos Eltis, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and their two sons.

A second adult novel, A Spot of Bother, was published in September 2006. In 2009, he donated the short story The Island to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales´ project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Haddon's story was published in the 'Fire' collection.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a murder mystery told by a boy with some degree of autism. Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is mathematically gifted and socially all at sea. He grows up in a working-class home with parents who can barely cope with their child. He takes everything that he sees, or is told, at face-value, and is unable to interpret the behaviour around him.

Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbor's poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork. Wellington's owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves to discover just who has ´murdered´ Wellington and solve the case, like his admired Sherlock Holmes. (The book´s title comes from a line in a Conan Doyle short story) He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations as a way of organising his thoughts. As the mystery leads him to the secrets of his parents' broken marriage, uses deductive logic to navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains a closed book to him. Christopher is a sympathetic boy: not closed off or empty, as the stereotype would have it, but overwhelmed by sensations, lacking the filters that would help him make sense of reality.

Haddon sustains Christopher´s distinctive voice and does a remarkable job in putting the reader inside his head. Having little emotional insight and only really feeling at home with numbers and facts, not people, Christopher shows us what he sees and allows us to draw our own conclusions. Though he insists, "This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them," the novel brims with touching and ironic humour.

Questions to think about while reading

How does it feel to see the world through Christopher´s eyes? Does the novel change your perspectives on people with learning difficulties? If so,how?

Haddon has said that his starting point for the novel was the image of a dead dog and that the voice was a point of view decision in order to sustain the plot he wanted. Most readers, however, have responded to the first person narrator. Could the story have been told from any other point of view?

The novel works on several levels. In your view, is it a novel for children or adults- or both?

For an interview with Mark Haddon about the novel go to:

http://www.powells.com/authors/haddon.html