Nothing says good fun to me like a brutal post-apocalyptic dystopia.  Or maybe not.  Seriously, dissolving the very fabric of society, then tossing some unfortunate and more-or-less noble characters into the mix can make for a compelling read as you become a voyeur watching these people suffer and hopefully survive.  But the whole experience can also be tough to stomach and ultimately unpleasant.

Reading The Road and Blindness within a year of each other made me think about my own writing.  Not stylistically, of course.  Both Saramago and McCarthy are prone to the mile-long sentence (which quite honestly I find a bit exhausting); my thoughts come out in my writing a bit more bite-sized.  I’m talking about more basic decisions about how far you can go with plot and character.  The decisions that writers make about how much to torture their creations (both figuratively and literally).

True, there is plenty of fiction populated with horror monsters and serial killers where the unrelenting gore and sadism is played as a vicarious thrill.  But that is not what Saramago and McCarthy are doing.  In these books, the theme is that in extreme circumstances people are nothing more than animals and the characters at the heart of the book that we root for are the exceptions that prove the rule.  That’s a bleak view of humanity that is hard to hang a novel on (which is why I was so interested in these books in relation to my own work, which at least in initial concept often hinges on a similar idea).

When I first started writing short stories way back in high school, they all ended the same way — the main character died at the end.  It just seemed to me to be the best way to get out of a story.  In the process of getting to that inevitable end, other horrible things tended to happen.  The thing is — I have a pretty happy life.  Friends, family, security — it’s all good.  Which just makes me wonder even more what drives me to write about people trapped in the worst of circumstances.  Is it purely an interest in creating fiction with appropriate conflict?  Or am I truly messed up?

Looking at Blindness and The Road, therefore, is somewhat comforting to me.  Saramago imposes a mass plague of blindness on his created world (with the exception of one pivotal character).  Instead of reacting with strength and nobility, society dissolves into chaos and brutality.  It is a powerful story, but unrelenting in its position that people are at their worst in a crisis, when faced with their own vulnerability.  The Road takes place after an unspecified apocalyptic event leaves people to fend for themselves in a pre-industrial wasteland.  Again, everything falls apart.  The main characters, a man and his son, spend most of their time hiding from other people, who apparently are more dangerous than the apocalypse itself.

Both books are masterfully written.  Both are compelling page turners.  And both made me nauseous.

Is that what authors want to do to their readers?  Or, from my point of view, the question is how far a writer can push readers without losing them completely.  Because as a writer, my instinct is always to push them pretty far.

There are scenes in both of these books that stick in my head, that help me draw the lines in my own work, mainly because I found them so disturbing to read.  In Blindness, it is a gang rape of women who offered themselves up as sacrifices to protect a weaker group of detainees at an institution.  In The Road, it is when the main characters come across a group of survivors who have devolved into cannibalism.  The symbolism of both scenes is inescapable and powerful, but while reading both I found that  the queasy sensationalism undermined that for me.

Ultimately, both authors pull a somewhat hopeful message from the despair (though it doesn’t necessarily feel that way until you think about it later after the last page is read).  What interests me more though is watching two of our best living writers push the limits of where they can take their readers and still have them stick around for the ending in the first place.  Apparently, pretty far indeed.