Book Review: "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson

I Am Legend (1954)

3 Stars out of 5

Richard Matheson

(This short novel has a clever and ironic twist at the end. Even setting the stage as I do in the following paragraphs there are nevertheless a few spoilers.)

There is something to being the first to write in a particular fantasy genre as Richard Matheson did in 1954 with “I Am Legend”. With this book he was able to take the vampire motif introduced by Bram Stoker with Dracula in 1897 and combine it into an apocalyptic vision of a world gone to ruin courtesy of disease. Whether or not Matheson invented the Diseased World Apocalypse genre or not may not be the point, as he is certainly given the credit by many critics as the one who popularized it. Again, being first with a popular novel on the topic has its advantages; one being that it helps gloss over the structural flaws in the book. Perhaps, a better genre classification for “I Am Legend” is simple pulp fiction with a twist at the end.

Matheson’s book describes the life of Robert Neville as he tries to live out his life in the remains of  Los Angeles following some kind of nuclear exchange. While the effects of such a war were horrible in their short term effects, their long term effects were for Neville and the other survivors far worse. It would seem in this alternate world, one of the lasting effects of the war is the creation of vast dust storms. Bad in and of themselves the dust storms bring a hidden danger: contagion. This disease as deciphered later in the book by self-taught scientist Neville is a bacterium within the dust clouds that induces a form of vampirism. Though Matheson struggles at times to describe the condition brought on by the disease, it evidently kills some and then re-animates them as corpses with a taste for human blood. Oddly, it leaves others alive but with a similar diet; some of these are sane, some not. Matheson and Neville puzzle over the various symptoms (aversion to sunlight, garlic, mirrors, etc.) and conclude some could be psychological and others physiological. Sorting which is which consumes some small, early parts from this rather short novel (160 pp, more a novella than novel), but it does give our protagonist Neville a reason to go on.

The novel opens with Neville hovering between acute alcoholism and psychosis. When he is roughly functioning, he spends a considerable amount of time thinking about the female vampires that lurk outside his door. Yes, poor Robert has issues. To his credit, Matheson has tried to create a picture of a man left alone, bereft of his wife and daughter, who must fight a daily battle against hordes that quite literally wish to consume him. Perhaps, it would drive just about anyone up against the wall that separates sanity from insanity. Neville’s burden of survivor’s guilt is not his only burden. He had to watch civilization crumble before his eyes; had to watch the authorities take his daughter’s corpse to be burnt in a vain effort to prevent further contamination; and most painfully, he had to find a solution for his beloved wife Virginia’s body that did not include burning, but did include something quite nearly as shocking to endure, let alone perform. So, Robert drinks whiskey and screams, sleeps and ponders the wailing vampires behind his locked front door. He lacks a vision or even a reason to go on.

Neville spends many of his sober days finding parts to repair his vehicle and home. When he is up for it, he enters the houses near his home and dispatches the sleeping neighbors-now-vampires. Some are the undead and die their final death in a puff of dust, but others lay breathing in a coma-like state. Robert drives a wooden stake through the heart of each regardless of their dead or undead state. This is a mistake that will come to haunt him. But in the early parts of the book, he writes off his actions as defensive. In time, he finds such activities to be inadequate motivation to go on. He drives to the central library near his home and begins a multi-year study of Biology, Bacteriology, Psychology and likely a few other disciplines. These studies not only provide Robert with a new hobby, they give author Matheson an opportunity to create a quasi-scientific explanation for vampirism. Robert is content, he has found an explanation for the world he lives in. (A little weird, that a self-taught junior scientist could figure this out, while the rest of the scientific establishment could not? Oh well, it is a fantasy.)

Robert has largely stopped drinking, but he is alone. He has a chance with a dog that survived the first two years without getting sick, but within a few weeks of meeting Robert, the dog sickens and dies. Alone again, Robert sights a young woman out in the daylight. Seemingly not a vampire, Robert runs after her and fairly roughly captures her despite her quite evident fear. He treats her harshly; she is frightened and not aggressive. These early phases of their relationship give good clues to the book’s title and to who Robert really is. The book closes with a clever metaphorical and literal twist. By the book’s end Robert slowly comes to more accurately see the world he lives in. And he finally understands that it is he, not the vampire of old, which is the new legend. In the final paragraphs, Matheson redeems himself and the book. He has written a tale with a lesson on viewpoint and The Other. That he has done so with such a weird and fantastic use of pseudo-science seems quite odd to me. Nevertheless, the final lesson is a good one, and with such a short book as this one, it took a slightly long walk to reach the conclusion.

This book does have a message and in the early parts of the novel does a good job of creating a modern version of Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The last “civilized” man on Earth theme is done fairly well and does engender in the reader some thoughts as to just how one might do in such a situation. But unlike the contemporary TV drama “The Walking Dead”, Matheson’s story-telling does little to invoke an emotional response in the reader. His prose might well be as disconnected from human feeling as a newspaper article. He has a message, and his imagination is artful, but his style is inadequate to tell a human tale, only to tell a human lesson. The lesson he writes of is an ironic one of viewpoint and in the final analysis makes reading this book worth the effort.

Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven (2014)

Four Stars out of Five

Emily St. John Mandel

Ionesco published a play in 1961 about conformity and mass movements, “Rhinoceros”. In his play set in a small town in France, the town drunkard, Berenger watches in amazement and disgust as his fellow townspeople transform into Rhinoceroses. Berenger has multiple arguments with his friends prior to each transforming. His friends make the argument that Humanism is dead and is time for the Rhino. Ionesco was making an argument about conformity, but I heard a different argument: that many people, frustrated and confused by modern life would choose a simpler life if they could. I think that at the root of the current wave of apocalyptic movies and books such as “The Walking Dead”, “The Last Ship”, “Road Warrior”, “The Hunger Games”, etc. (the list is endless), there is a subtext that argues for a return to a pre-industrial world. A world where the average person understands the most advanced technology around him (e.g. fixing a wooden fence). But what would really be lost in some kind of apocalyptic end to civilization? In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 book, “Station Eleven”, we get one aspect of such losses.

“Station Eleven” begins with Arthur Leander acting the role of King Lear in a Toronto theater.  During his performance we are introduced to eight year old Kirsten Raymonde, a child actress in the play with Arthur. Arthur suffers a heart attack during the play, and shortly thereafter the world is plunged (quite literally) into darkness as a bad case of influenza sickens and kills over 99% of humanity. The book jumps forward twenty years where re-meet Kirsten, now a young woman – a very hardened young woman. She remains an actress (as well as fierce warrior) in a band of artists called the Travelling Symphony. This symphony is a mixture of Shakespearean actors and musicians. They move along the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan within former automobiles drawn by horses. They encounter a rough crowd in a small village known as St. Deborah’s by the Water. The townspeople are led by an individual known as the Prophet. Fleeing St. Deborah’s by the Water, the symphony heads towards a former airport in Severn City.

Mandel does a very skillful job of moving back and forward in time from the early days of Arthur’s acting career, through his three marriages, to his King Lear performance in Toronto, and finally to various time frames in the post-flu era. In the process of doing so, Mandel weaves several themes from Shakespeare’s time of plague, elements from King Lear and more importantly to a graphic novel written and illustrated by Arthur’s first wife, Miranda. The graphic novel is the source of the book’s title of “Station Eleven”. Within this graphic novel, there is a futuristic view of the world as seen through the eyes of the novel’s protagonist, Dr. Eleven. He governs a mobile worldlet (Station Eleven) that has suffered its own apocalypse. His decisions and worldview have condemned the other inhabitants to a life away from Earth and as it develops a world beneath the waves on their moon-sized satellite. The people that live beneath the water (unlike Dr. Eleven who lives on one of the few islands) strain and rebel at their situation.

The intended parallels of Station Eleven’s Undersea denizens and those of the post-flu world where Kirstin lives are not hard to find. Like my allusion above, the people of Undersea want only to go back to what they once had. Even though they fled the Earth due to an alien invasion, and even though to return to Earth would require untold sacrifices, they will accept those sacrifices, if only they can return to the home they once knew. In Kirsten’s world, many of the villages she and the Travelling Symphony pass through, also have made this choice. They will not tell the new generation of the things they once had (cell phones, etc.), but rather they have chosen in this new (old) world of no technology, no medicine, no nations, and no vision of the future; only instead a vision of the present, which actually is a view to the past.

There are exceptions in Kirsten’s world, and Severn City Airport is one such exception. Here is a Museum of Civilization. This museum is a collection of those very same cell phones, PCs, high heel shoes and so forth. Indeed, right outside the museum’s walls is a collection of the jet airplanes that flew into the airport even as civilization was crumbling. In an oft-used technique by Mandel of coincidence, the Museum is run by Arthur’s best friend, Clark. There are many other coincidences throughout the book, some of which are used to create a few dramatic mysteries. None of the mysteries are very (or even a little hard) to penetrate by the reader. They add little to the story, but they are minor distractions. What does add to the story is Mandel’s use of an extremely nostalgic recitation of the Things We Have Lost. Rarely have I read or viewed a story wherein the various artifacts of modern life that would be lost during a civilization-ending event have been discussed in a more poignant manner. There is little poignancy otherwise within this book, but the almost Ray Bradburian fashion that Mandel uses to describe a loss of the future (in stark contrast to those mourning the loss of the past) is the book’s most notable feature.

There are parallels to the story’s impact on human life that mirror the impact of the Black Plague on Shakespeare’s time. Like the mordant tone of King Lear, the human suffering, its’ sense of regret and madness, Kirsten’s world has its share of those that regret the loss of the future and those that choose madness as an escape. Thus both Shakespeare’s world and his play offer examples of life in Kirsten’s world; in the same manner, the “fiction” within Kirsten’s world of the graphic novel acts rather like King Lear – that is the reality of Kirsten’s world and the fiction of Station Eleven all line up. There is suffering, there is regret, and there is a sense of world’s end. The big difference is that in Shakespeare’s time, you could kill off two-thirds of Europe and not destroy civilization. Whereas, in Kirsten’s (and our) world, if you kill off a sufficient number of people, the people that provide the knowledge and experience of a highly technological civilization, then you lose that civilization. You lose it so bad, it may be unrecoverable. That Mandel gives a glimmer of hope at the book’s end, suggests she may of two minds on the subject of technological civilizations.

But I think her main point is embodied in the epigram at the book’s ending (see below). It seems clear to me that she is suggesting that she too votes for the past. I vote for the future, for medicine, for cell phones and jet airplanes, and for a sense that the future is better, not worse than the past. More complicated, yes, but better, and for me that is the key. Despite my opposing worldview, Mandel’s book is one worth reading; if only to get an opposing point of view.

The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness

And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,

And for me, now as then, it is too much.

There is too much world.

-Czeslaw Milosz

The Separate Notebooks