Read McCarthy’s novel first to appreciate the subtlety of Larcenet’s superb graphic adaptation.
A suitably dark graphic treatment of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece.
French artist Larcenet delivers a full 21 frames before McCarthy’s main characters, a father and his preadolescent son, speak. That’s fitting: In the original novel, the father is grimly taciturn, while the boy is full of anxious questions: Are we the good guys in the piece? Are the bad guys going to eat us? Larcenet’s landscape is the dark, dead land of nuclear winter; in an afternote, he admits to liking snow, though atop every snowbank here, it seems, there’s a corpse. Larcenet’s rendering of the father looks nothing like the Viggo Mortensen of the film, for, as he writes in an afterword, “I’ve been racking my brain to avoid any reference to the movie adaptation.” Instead, the man looks like one of the hirsute Trumpets who stormed the Capitol. But then, so do all the other grown-ups, personal hygiene having fallen victim to the irradiated world of the future. McCarthy’s story is simple: The man and the boy have to head south to find a place they hope isn’t frozen solid. On the way, wheeling a shopping cart, they have to keep their few possessions safe from scavengers while avoiding gangs of roving, cannibalistic brigands. The son remembers a few hallmarks of the old world, praying that a dead family whose larder they’ve raided “are safe in heaven.” Dad, meanwhile, is full of more instructive notes: “You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget,” he remarks amid an endless landscape of tortured corpses and detached skulls. The story, as with McCarthy’s work in general, ends happily only if you count mere survival as a satisfying resolution. Larcenet’s brooding black-and-white drawings suit the original perfectly.
Read McCarthy’s novel first to appreciate the subtlety of Larcenet’s superb graphic adaptation.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781419776779
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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