What Happened to the Battle That Was Ragin'?

As Jenny Diski says repeatedly in Picador's lovely "BIG IDEAS/small books" edition of The Sixties:  "The music was undeniably as great as we thought it was."  She repeats this over and over again, and over and over again I agreed with her.  She says, perfectly, "The music knew where we were going in our heads and wrote the score."  It reminded me of the scene in The Big Chill when one of Harold's (Kevin Kline's) college friends accuses him of being stuck in the 60's because all he plays on his stereo is 60's music.  One friend says, "Come on, there's been some great music since then", but isn't able to name any.  (That film soundtrack remains one of the best of all time.)

This is a small book, in both size and length, at 134 pages, but Diski is succinct, objective, and honest in her analysis of those times.  She's also a Brit, so it was interesting to read her take on what was happening in the U.S. from someone "across the pond."

I have another book by Diski, Stranger on a Train, (subtitled "Daydreaming and Smoking Around America With Interruptions").  The title alone was funny, and I really enjoyed this addition to the Travel section of my bookcase.  It was much more than a book on her travels by train, and the difficulties of smoking during her travels; like Paul Theroux, she has a knack for writing memorable portraits of the people she meets, and for writing profoundly on life in general as she makes her way to her destination.

I'm glad Diski made clear at the beginning of the book that:

"The Sixties, of course, were not the decade of the same name.  They began in the mid-1960s with the rise of popular culture. . . aided by a generation of people who did not have an urgent economic fear, nor (in Britain) a war to deal with, and it ended in the mid-1970s when all the open-ended possibilities we saw began to narrow. . ."

She says that the "big idea" we had, that included "freedom, liberty, permission, a great enlarging of human possibilities" was "an idea we failed to think through.  It was a failure of thought essentially, rather than a failure of imagination."  This is crucial.  What made those times so exciting and made them feel so open-ended was the power of our imaginations.  We had a great sense of play. 

She talks about the "terrible clarity of vision" that's "available to the young of every generation, and those who look become the trouble-makers, the difficult ones, that the elders complain about eternally."  How much better could the gist of those times be stated?  This also rang a bell to me personally, as I have always felt that I'm the "difficult" one of my siblings, the one unafraid to pull the covers off the truth and talk about what lies underneath.  I think a lot of those who were close to me at the time held that same spot in their family dynamic.

Diski is truthful about the failures of those times, but also kind toward our youthful hopes and dreams.  "Like the young at all times, I imagined that such as us had never happened before, and that nothing was ever going to be the same again once the old had passed into their pottering retirement.  What the young don't get is that they are young; the old are right, young is a phase the old go through."

To paraphrase Dylan, there are certainly still "battles ragin'", but I don't see youth on the front lines of those battles (against war and various oppressions) like we were in the 60's.  There are surely youth out there who are pursuing their ideals, and those ideals surely include freedom and liberty.  But despite the proliferation of media tools for networking and the spread of information, I don't hear or see much real rebellion in the air, at least not from youth.  Diski thinks the generations older and younger than us "are more inclined than we were to reproduce for their young what they experienced in their childhood, rather than offer them Wonderland.  We were stardust, we were golden and we had to get ourselves back to the garden. . ."

 

The Passage

Recently, I find myself pulling fantasy novels off my bookshelf. Is it because I need an escape from the debilitating and constant unemployment situation? Because of the continuing and futile war, disappointment in Obama, floods and earthquakes killing so many people? Although I’ve always enjoyed fantasy and sci-fi (I loved Anne Rice 's vampire series, and the heroine in Dana Gabaldon’s Outlander series is one of the all-time greats of any genre), they don’t form the bulk of my library, and recently, I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction. But it’s also true that since childhood, I’ve loved myths and fairy tales. I still periodically re-read them, and just bought a nice leather volume of Bullfinch’s Mythology at the latest AAUW Book Sale. Myths are, after all, our oldest stories. Stories of quests, strange creatures, and the battle of good versus evil remain as popular today as eons ago. (Also, the first novel I wrote turned out to be a fantasy novel – did I subconsciously want to write a tale like those that first hooked me on reading?)

My nephew recently lent me The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly, which was very well-written. I particularly enjoyed his history of the fairy tales used in the book, in an appendix to the novel.

The book that’s lingered in my head for weeks now, though, through others I’ve read in the meantime, is The Passage, by Justin Cronin. I bought the book after reading an interview with him on the Powell’s Books website (http://www.powells.com/); the book sounded intriguing, and I was in the mood for escape after the two tomes I’d just finished (see earlier blog).

The theory voiced most often in the media in explanation of the spate of films and novels about vampires and zombies in the past few years is this: We feel helpless in relation to the economy, environmental disasters, and endless and futile wars (sounds like I fit right in). These vampire/zombie films and novels voice our helplessness in the face of implacable foes that can’t be killed and which we can’t control.

From the first chapter, Cronin convinces us that his world is real. It could be our world, which is what makes it truly frightening. Although The Passage is dark and terrifying, it’s also full of compassion for its characters. The unlikely heroine is a child, but there is another character whose presence remains throughout the book even after he’s physically left the scene, and was, to me, the true hero.

These vampires are unapproachable and not the least enigmatic, unlike Lestat or Louis (or Edward in the Twilight series). They’ve been created by man, and man can’t fix the terror he’s unleashed.

My only complaint is the ending. I felt the same way after reading the long and creepy, and sometimes maddeningly repetitive novel, Drood. This ending isn’t as frustrating, but I did have the same urge, though only momentary this time, to toss the book across the room. Then I re-read the last chapter and thought maybe it had to end that way. Or did it? Cronin’s definitely left things open for a sequel.