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A Desolate Splendor

by John Jantunen

It may have become too easy to invoke the name Cormac McCarthy when discussing a certain strain of contemporary fiction, but when the shoe fits so snugly, such comparisons are unavoidable.

Reviews-December_ADesolateSplendor_CoverJohn Jantunen’s second novel is firmly set in McCarthy country. The time and place are indeterminate, but the social, physical, and linguistic landscapes are very much borrowed from the master. A great war, or some such collapse, has destroyed civilization and thrust humanity several hundred – or even thousand – years back into a preindustrial, barely agricultural wasteland. It is a reflexive American frontier, a burnt-out district of mythic savagery over which the course of empire runs in reverse.

The figures in this landscape have degenerated in a similar way. They are not intellectual or spiritual beings; their morality is scarcely advanced beyond Bronze Age concepts of loyalty to one’s family or one’s hounds. There is no God in heaven, only “the desolate splendor of the world beyond ours” – meaning the stars. On the earthly plane, life has been reduced to the rudiments of survival: gathering food, rutting, and fighting off wild animals (including murderous tribes of other, even further devolved humans).

The language has the poetic twang of McCarthy’s folksy-archaic-Biblical style: “Above the camp, the moon peered through a haze drift of smoke and the stars were but motes coruscate against the void, indifferent and laggard in their contemplation of the mortal world below.” A man stands beneath these stars in “sullen recompose,” listening to a woman “break into baleful lamentations.” The direct speech – unencumbered, as in McCarthy, with quotation marks – is rendered in a rustic dialect that’s a generation removed from book learnin’. One of the characters complains that “I’ma tryin ta read” when in fact he is only describing pictures in books.

This is the world of A Desolate Splendor, and if it sounds like a McCarthy novel, right down to the archetypal characters – centrally, “the man” and “the boy” – that’s still some achievement. However, Jantunen is a talented storyteller in his own right, with a real gift for describing the richness and magical qualities of the natural world. There is something remarkably romantic and pagan in his evocation of the post-Apocalyptic wilderness. Though the characters seem at times to be little advanced from the mud or trees, that natural environment is itself a thrilling, animistic place, where even the rocks seem to have a monstrous life of their own and “frogsong trill[s] in a nebulous thunder.”

The story is an odd piece of work, consisting of several different narrative blocks that bump into each other in bloody ways. The main characters are the boy and his father, who are homesteaders. The other groups include a gang of desperadoes, a pair of neo-native warriors, and a gathering of female breed stock. Also in the mix are feral packs of humanity who decorate their bodies with bones and paint. Instead of resolution the novel moves toward an affirmation of continuity, albeit at the lowest level of the continuance of the species. Civilization doesn’t seem likely to experience a rebound.

As familiar as some of this terrain has become, A Desolate Splendor surveys it with bleak confidence: a forceful, visionary novel written in passionate and sensual language.

 

Reviewer: Alex Good

Publisher: ECW Press

DETAILS

Price: $18.95

Page Count: 256 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-77041-204-0

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: December 2016

Categories: Fiction: Novels