Post Apocalyptic Book Club: Earth Abides
Sharon October 22nd, 2008
Ok, things have been shifting so fast that it almost seems as though it isn’t nearly as fun to read post-apocalyptic novels anymore 
. I’ve fallen down on the job pretty badly – but am finally catching up on Hunter-Gatherer month. So let’s talk a bit about George Stewart’s classic novel _Earth Abides_.
This month’s works have the pleasure of fairly high quality writing. Stewart’s narrative is, I think, quite gracefully done, and watching Ish navigate through the process of discovery, of grief and its stages, the slow discovery of what he wants and a future for himself, the recognition that he doesn’t fit with everyone who has survived - in a sense, I think Stewart may have narrated the process of adapting to disaster better than almost anyone else.
The book was written in 1949, and it contains some gender and racial issues from those periods, some of the same things we’ll see in Alas Babylon, written less than a decade later. But like Alas Babylon, the book tries very hard not to stretch past that viewpoint. Ish often assumes he’s smarter than his wife since he thinks mostly about things like the future of civilization, and she tends to focus on practicalities, but the book shows over and over again that Em is actually more attuned to the present than Ish is. It is she who points out that they need a sense of time more than the retention of high culture.
“Again he thought that was like a woman, to put even such an all-important thing as the very date in terms of her unborn child. But yet, as so often, her instinct was right – a great pity if the historical record should be broken at some point! Doubtless in the long run, archaeologists could restore the continuity by means of varves or dendrochronology, but it would save a lot of work if someone merely kept the tradition.” (123)
Ish cannot but think in terms of maintaining the past – but the future reshapes itself, and shows his fixation on the past as a failure, a limitation in the end. In fact, it turns out that once they find a way to track time, the way they track time reshapes the narrative – the “Quick Years” section of the book picks up the way that time changes for them.
The book chooses to imply that the fact that the children lose literacy is mostly an inevitability – Ish tries, at least casually, to teach the children, but it never works, and soon, literacy becomes less and less relevant to them. This part of the narrative seems the most unlikely to me – there are so many ways in which literacy might have had direct relevance – in which parents might have discovered new things in books, and transmitted them. The idea that all the parents except Ish casually dismiss the value of literacy in life that does not seem overly laborious seems strange and unlikely to me. The idea that Joey is the single potential carrier of literacy too, seems strange.
In this case, I think Stewart needed to strip literacy off his society, and chose to do so in a rather inadequate way. But it is a fascinating narrative, this loss of literacy and of civilization. Ish tries to hold on, and we cannot but sympathize with his attempts – but neither does the book allow us to see them as right or true in all respects. In the end, Ezra says that what those who survived had was what was most needed,
“Why each of them survived the Great Disaster – that I still do not know. but I think I can see why each of them survived the shock that came afterwards, when so many went under. George and Maurine and perhaps Molly too, they lived on and did not go crazy because they were stolid and had no imagination. And Jean survived because she had her temper and fought back at life; and I, because I went out from myself and shared the lives of other people. And you and Em…”
But here Ezra paused, so that Ish himself could speak.
“Yes,” said Ish, “you are right, I think….And I, I could live because I stood at one side and watched what was happening. And as for Em….”
There he too paused, and Ezra spoke again.
“Well, as we were, so The Tribe will be. It will not be brilliant, because we were not like that. Perhaps the brilliant ones were not suited to survive….But as for Em, there is no need to explain, for we know that she was the strongest of us all. Yes, we needed many things. We needed George and his carpentry, and we needed your foresight, and perhaps we needed my knack of making one person work better with another, even thought I did little by myself. But most of all, I think, we needed Em, for she gave us courage, and without courage there is only a slow dying, not life.”
This reminds me of Annie LaMott’s claim that one of the lessons of life is that the people who are here are the right people. The narrative claim is not so much that any of the characters was perfect, but that their collective strength was sufficient, and it made a people that were shaped, if not controlled, by their origins.
Ultimately, given the parameters the author sets out, I find the book both compelling and fascinating. I don’t necessarily think that the outcome – the stripping of civilization, loss of literacy and most (not all – we are told that patrilineal descent among other things, is retained because people are still too American to make the shift) of prior culture could happen nearly as quickly as Stewart suggests, but the accelleration is, in part, a narrative quirk in itself – its pathos is increased by having a unified narrator tell the whole story.
What did you think of the book?