I finished The Blair Years. Final estimate: anti-climactic. I’m well aware that a diary, or any non-fiction for that matter, can’t just make up a nice Hollywood ending, but there’s something to be said for not misleading your audience either. It took 600 odd pages to get to Bush’s presidency and another fifty or so before the Iraq War came up. Considering ‘The Blair Years’ is practically a short hand for the post-9/11 wars in Aphganistan and Iraq, it seems downright cruel to carry the reader all that way and then leave them with a haphazard assortment of mini-anecdotes about the run up to the war. I’m sure most of the good stuff was edited out, but it honestly would have been a stronger narrative if he’d cut the book off just as the Bush stuff was about to happen. I’d rather have a cliff-hanger than a botched and boring token gesture, especially coming off a fascinating look at the back-end of the Bosnia/Kosovo conflict…
Next book on the docket: Naked Lunch by Burroughs. Can’t get much different…
In other news, I watched the movie adapation of Cormac McCArthy’s The Road. In theory, it belongs to that venerable holiday genre: apocalypse survival movies, but it’d be tough to put it next to Mad Max and Children of Men.
The spoilerless gist of the movie is a father and son wander the post-apocalyptic wasteland surviving and looking for a better place. There’s a little violence, there’s a few semi-shocking revelations about the survivors, there’s some back-story about the father and son, but it all wraps up in just under two hours.
I’d like to say it was a good movie, and I can, grudgingly, but I found it boring. I suspect the book is very good, haven’t read yet, but on film the story didn’t seem to come together. The father’s relationship with his son in a nuclear winter is an interesting concept and the movie tried awfully hard to make it interesting, but the whole thing came off too brooding, too slow, and ultimately unfulfilled.
I’m currently working on my own slow, brooding short story. Coming along, coming along. I’ve got three other short stories out in the wild. The fourth came back declined. Sigh and double sigh, but that’s how it goes. I’m hoping to get that one out again sometime tomorrow. However…
there’s not that much point in me rambling about it. It’s been a slow week in general, but the weather is getting better. I’m hoping to put up some hiking pictures soon. Until then, I’m out.
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