When I was a teen, I began Pat Frank's then famous 1959 novel Alas, Babylon. Back then, the world seemed dangerously close to a nuclear exchange with the Soviets, and to an OCD kid who loved dark science fiction, I wanted to see the glowing mutants stumbling through the radioactive dust of scorched cites. It was a sort of whistling in the dark. I never finished the book, because the cover was the scariest part. The image above is the edition I owned, but the back had no bar-code. Those didn't exist on books in the 70s.
Inside the book, to dorky me, the human drama of survival was boring. I wanted big explosions and flesh-eating monsters under a Strontium sky.
Now I prefer well developed characters. It seems that only character will get us out of the perils of 2020, when everything seems a powderkeg of a different sort than the global one in 1959. One detail that did stay with me from my teen-aged abortive reading was the blurb on the paperback's back cover, something about the "thin veneer" of civilization vanishing. Well, I learned a new word at least. And that's a good take on Frank's novel, one that compares favorably to more recent work such as Jim Kunstler's World Made by Hand novels or the older Earth Abides by George Stewart. That final one might have been best for this summer, as it concerns a pandemic. Or Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower, with its depiction of a racist American dystopia in the midst of environmental crises.
As for nuclear-war fiction? My gold standard has come to be Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, but that too is another story.
Yet Frank's novel kept calling me. And this time, the human drama kept me reading it. I finished in a couple of sessions, so it's most definitely a page turner. The book might be called one of the gentlest treatments of nuclear war imaginable; Brian Aldiss called such fictions "cozy catastrophes." Frank lets the horrors happen offstage, making the book readable for those who are ordinarily terrified by such fiction. The little town of Fort Repose, Florida, gets lucky, when an east wind and perhaps a Russian dud aimed at Cape Canaveral save them from the fallout. Yet necessities soon become scarce, the lights go out, and the town's one doctor must cope as best he can.
He'd make a fine protagonist, but Frank chooses Randy Bragg, who begins the novel as a somewhat dissolute Korean-War veteran whose family fortune is quickly vanishing. He's not a static character, as one recent reviewer claims, nor a shallow one. The same review critiques, rather unfairly, a perceived masculist tone of the book, largely based on one moment of internal dialog in Bragg's head. If anything, Bragg exemplifies the sort of Southern small-town Progressive whose was very rare then and, too often, now: he helps and befriends his African-American neighbors The Henrys, and he demonstrates sympathy for the women in his life. Minor characters, while not as richly drawn as some of Kunstler's, offer a glimpse into the world of ours, circa 1959, on the brink of ending. I particularly enjoyed the Western Union operator, whose contacts with the outside world on The Day show that before the Internet, there was still a global network. The arrogant town banker remains sadder; soon his bank is worthless, because it has only paper money no good for trade.
That points to what remains my biggest problem with World Made By Hand; I wanted Kunstler's story to begin in our own period of technological plenty. In Frank's book, we get that for a good part of the novel. It's nostalgic, too. I well recall pre-Interstate Florida before over-development began the ruination that a rising sea will finish in a century or two.
That points to what remains my biggest problem with World Made By Hand; I wanted Kunstler's story to begin in our own period of technological plenty. In Frank's book, we get that for a good part of the novel. It's nostalgic, too. I well recall pre-Interstate Florida before over-development began the ruination that a rising sea will finish in a century or two.
Yet Alas, Babylon is far from perfect. Dialogue can get wooden between the sexes, in particular. Randy is a bit of a stretch. He has three (at least) old or potential flames and this takes the book into the male-fantasy camp. Yet despite that misstep, the novel really looked ahead in terms of racial politics and a sense of social justice, even if that includes rough justice for highwaymen. Their menace is well portrayed, as they begin to prey upon all races in Fort Repose when the pickings grow slim elsewhere in Florida's "Contaminated Zone."
Why read the book now? And what is it doing in a blog about rural life? I would claim it's a study in building a self-reliant community. I don't believe in the American myth of self-sufficiency, as I've noted before. But self-reliance as a key to resilience? That I celebrate, and Bragg's story takes off when he decides that he and his family need to join others in town to keep that veneer of civilization from vanishing, altogether. They share resources to get well water, post notices about dangers, keep a short-wave radio working, organize a constabulary, make their own alcohol, maintain the town library, fish in the uncontaminated waters around Fort Repose.
In that regard and others, Alas, Babylon proves a hopeful book for this pandemic. Theirs is a world where folks do what is best for each other, even if they choose a wrong path initially. I compare that to our failure to stay out of restaurants and off beaches. Those show our lack of self-reliance, our inability to sacrifice. Yet there's hope. In the store yesterday, I saw only one white, angry-looking guy without a mask. A few weeks ago, most of the customers went about unmasked.
It's good to see some progress. That's one reason to dig out this old book and see how a classic story of disaster handles the human capacity for cooperation. May we do half so well this year and beyond. Seeing that angry man in the grocery store actually encouraged me. He and his selfish notion of "freedom" looked puny, and I think at some level, he knew it.
It's good to see some progress. That's one reason to dig out this old book and see how a classic story of disaster handles the human capacity for cooperation. May we do half so well this year and beyond. Seeing that angry man in the grocery store actually encouraged me. He and his selfish notion of "freedom" looked puny, and I think at some level, he knew it.
We'll outlast such attitudes.
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