I THOUGHT I WOULD WRITE A BOOK REVIEW on this marvelous Travis McGee detective mystery by John
D. MacDonald. It is very readable, fast-paced, and written with the immediacy
of a first person narration. And I like the details he adds about a particular skill, or process, or
observations of human character or society. For example, at the novel’s end,
Travis is recovering from a near-fatal encounter with the ex-boxer King
Sturnevan, an officer with the Cypress County police department, who murdered
two people while trying to recover a stash of stolen money. Travis,
recuperating on his houseboat, confides to his former girlfriend when she asks
him, “Do you need putting together?”
I looked
at her and knew that I did. “Something was going wrong and it went further
wrong. I don’t know. I lost it, somehow, without knowing what I lost. Some kind
of …sense of light and motion and purpose. I went ragged around the edges and
bleak in the middle. The world seems to be coarsening and me with it.
Everything that happens takes away, and less flows back. And I respond less,
and in the wrong way. I still amuse myself but there’s some contempt in it now.
I don’t know…I don’t know….”
Here, Travis confesses his own fragile
emotional state, as well as conveying a sense of unease about the health of his
society. McDonald provides other examples: He has Travis survey the dead,
corrupt police officer Lew Arnstead’s cabin, meticulously analyzing the
interior for clues to discover what and who had been there. There is an almost
obsessive attention paid to physical details, as well as details of process and
conjecture. In another setting, Travis examines the hidden trove of photographs
and letters he finds at Lew Arnstead’s home, reviewing the items so
methodically the reader feels they are examining them alongside the sleuth. Or
McDonald has Travis note how the tow truck raises his out-of-commission car
from the canal waters, “doing it right” by getting the proper leverage to lower
the heavy Rolls onto the side of the bank. Or when Travis notices the flaw in
the screwdriver kit he buys at the local hardware store, he observes the shoddy
workmanship of contemporary industrial manufacturing.
[It was] a compact, lightweight electric
screwdriver, variable speed, reverse, a goodly batch of interchangeable heads,
all in a tidy aluminum case for $26.95. No reason why Lennie shouldn’t buy his
bird dog a little present for the boat. The only flaw in the rig was that some
idiot, through cynicism or indifference, had specified steel pins in the
aluminum hinges and a steel latch on the case.
In order to cope with his confinement in a
jail cell, Travis concentrates on a particular memory, in this case a pair of
roller skates he once used as a youth. Since he has no control over his
immediate fate, and while waiting for his lawyer to visit, he uses this memory
to maintain his composure, recalling specifics of the skates on how they were
constructed, how they attached to his shoes, how they felt as he skated on the
roller rink’s surface, etc. He then recalls someone he once worked with during
a ‘stake out’ who used a similar meditation, creating imaginary bridge games in
his mind to pass the time. The man was killed during the course of their
investigation, and Travis reflects on all the bridge games that were lost when
he died.
Memory and the preservation of the past is
another theme in the novel, and during his deadly encounter with Perris, he
recalls the knife-throwing techniques he learned in Mexico, which he uses to
save his life. He kills Perris with a well-placed toss, silently thanking his
Mexican compatriot: “Thank you, Miguel. Thanks for the lessons. Without them
both of us would be dead, instead of only you. Sleep well.”
Finally, when Travis is issued a gun by
Sheriff Hyzer after he is made a temporary county deputy, details of the weapon are followed by Travis remembering when he’d
used a similar gun in the past.
I’d had one aboard the Busted Flush for a time and had used it on shark coming after the
hooked billfish, until one day I had decided that the shark was doing his
thing, and it was bloody and disrespectful to kill an honest scavenger just
because he happened to come into the ball park when you are trying to win.
Such
‘inserts’ allow MacDonald to highlight Travis’s ability to gather and analyze
details of places and people, and draw conclusions. In Travis’s discussions
with the police chief, he reviews scenarios of who might have done the various
murders, how, when etc.; again with a slow, logical laying out of the various
possibilities, with the strengths and flaws of each conjecture outlined and
assessed.
MacDonald provides several scenes where
male-female relationships are examined, and some frank sexuality is portrayed.
Sex, violence, cruelty, revenge, corruption and social decay, along with
role-playing, uncovering the past, discovering falsehoods and righting wrongs
are themes he explores. He also portrays scenes of love, tenderness, mutual
respect, friendship and redemption. Such concerns are found in many of
McDonald’s novels.
There
is a streak of cruelty in Travis the reader sees when he deliberately tricks
Betsy Kapp (who is later sadistically murdered by Officer King) into revealing
information about Lew Arnstead. His
observations about her person and her home are coloured by a certain amount of
contempt he feels for her that he acknowledges by the book’s end. Betsy lives
with a number of illusions and plays a number of “roles” in order to cope with
life, and Travis feels this insulates her from the ‘truths’ of her existence.
He is aware of her former relationship with the corrupt and amphetamine-addicted
Arnstead. As they drink and talk, Travis thinks, “She wasn’t going to give me
anything useful unless I found the right door and blew the hinges off.” In a
calculated role-play, he angrily denounces Arnstead as a violent brute and
womanizer who brags of his sexual conquests and was someone who took
compromising photographs of his girlfriends (including Betsy). Shocked, she
leaves the room and Travis thinks:
You are
a dandy fellow, T. McGee. All the lonely, wasted, wistful ones of the world
have some set of illusions which sustains them, which builds a warm shelter in
the wasteland of the heart. It does
them no good to see themselves as they really are, once you kick the shelter
down. This one was easy bed-game for any traveling man who wanted to indulge
her fantasies by playing the role of sentimental romanticism, with a little
spice of soap opera drama.
So,
while you are digging up whatever might be useful out of the little ruin you
have created, at least have the grace to try and put the make-believe garden
back in order. If you get the chance.
During
the course of their brief relationship—if I’m not mistaken the main story takes
place over the course of less than a week, and ‘novel-time’ is so strange and
timeless; perhaps ‘out-of-time’ is a better way of putting it—Travis comes to
see Betsy as more than a caricature or flawed human being, or someone he must
manipulate in order to further his investigation. He comes to see her as a person, as “Betsy”;
who is “nice”; who has “long, slim fingers”; whose large, “comedy breasts”
were, upon reflection “oddly wistful.” Sex with her was a surprising satisfying
and genuinely passionate experience, in contrast with Travis’s observations of
“whores” whom he likens to “mercenaries”, both of which are “lazy”, and share
in a shallow and self-serving sense of “professional satisfaction”:
[T]he mercenary blade always pierces exactly the
same heart, stopping it over and over again. Only the angle changes. Until all
hearts become the same target. And the hooker receives from all customers
exactly the same plum-taunt glans, slaying it in the same rocking lubricious
clench of inner muscle ring, clasp of outer labia, pumping it to its mall
jolting death, welcoming it ever again, affixed to the loins of another stranger,
but always the same in its greed for death. Only the duration changes. Until
all erection is the same, including the husband one, all equally meaningless
except for the chance for pleasure-feeling, and the money.
Sex for the women he meets during the
course of his investigations— those women who worked for Arnstead as
“part-time” prostitutes, (though not Betsy), was empty of any meaning beyond
that of “greed” and immediate gratification. “So simple a task [sex] it soon
has no meaning, and then there is no meaning in being a woman in that sense of
being a woman.” Their sexuality is in
contrast with Betsy and her, “silly, touching, romantic conviction that each
episode was unique and meaningful and full of glory.” Betsy was a lonely,
kind-hearted woman who didn’t deserve the brutal treatment she receives at the
hands of King. (Incidentally, the book’s title refers to the grotesque image of
Betsy as she hung, standing upright against a tree, strangled with a wire
around her throat.)
The character of Travis McGee is compelling because of his honest appraisal of the
world around him. He unveils the flaws and weaknesses in others with a brutal
honesty, but there are things about himself he will discover, as well. Nearing
the climax of the novel, he and the Sheriff discuss the violent events of the
past week and share personal revelations. This dialogue follows:
“You
have a couple of incurable hang-ups, Norman. One is an old-timey hang-up on
decency. The other hang-up is thinking too much, trying to separate cause and
effect and locate where the guilt is. You are not with the scene, man. Guilt
only happens to people who get caught. Sex is a handshake. Man has poisoned
himself and he’s on the way out, so pick up all the bread you can in any way
you can. Enjoy.’
“Sure,
McGee. Sell yourself first.”
“I keep
trying, but I haven’t been able to get into the spirit of the thing somehow. I
keep going back to this role-playing
of mine, you know, with the white horse and the maiden fair and the grail and
the dragons and all that crap.”
One flat
and mirthless grunt of laughter from Sheriff Hyzer.
Travis’
veneer of cynicism does not run as deep as he thinks or lets on, and he and the
Sheriff have more in common that they initially reckon. And the broader theme
of societal corruption is explored.
Travis says of the justice system (after he and Meyer have been arrested for
murder):
The law, in its every dimension of the control of
criminals, is geared to limited, stunted people. Regardless of what social,
emotional, or economic factor stunted them, the end product is hate, suspicion,
fear, violence, and despair. These are weaknesses, and the system is geared to
exploit weaknesses.
It’s not
exactly a ringing endorsement for the forces of law and order, though it is
interesting that Travis sees Norman Hyzer as an exception to the common types
usually found in police departments. When Meyer is beaten by Deputy Arnstead,
Hyzer takes immediate steps to dismiss him and charges him with assault, a
positive thing in itself, yet it is clear that without Hyzer’s own sense of
personal integrity (and even that is
almost irreparably compromised through Arnstead’s subtle blackmailing), the
Cypress County police department would be a harsher and more corrupt
institution. That Deputy Arnstead could operate his prostitution ring with
someone as honest and by-the-book as Hyzer being aware of his operation and
turning a blind eye, says just how little stands in the way of the tidal forces
of lawlessness and social decay.
Cruelty, both personal and societal, is an
important theme for MacDonald. After talking with Lew Arnstead’s mother about
her cataracts and how she hoped to be ready for surgery soon, Travis recalls
reading about charlatan doctors in India who prey upon poor rural villagers in
need of eye surgery, and whose ‘miracle’ cure for the disease causes their
eventual blindness. Travis goes on to reflect how this vile practice might not
be as cruel as one where children are deliberately maimed in order to be put
onto the streets of Indian cities to beg for criminal gangs. He ends with the
thought that “cruelty itself might be a philosophical abstraction”, which
suggests a somewhat jaded and despairing view of the world, a world that for
Travis has become “nasty, brutish and
short”. [Thomas Hobbes’ famous words,
of course. Ed.] That he uncovers hidden cruelty and brutal violence in
Cypress County—and ends it—is his way of combating the “coarsening” world
around him.
Apathy, disengagement and social isolation
are societal ills that Travis sees when, for example, he follows Betsy back to
her house for drinks. He notes the “old residential areas where the people sat
in their dimly lighted rooms, watching all the frantic imitations of festivity
on the small home screens, watching the hosts and the hostesses who were old,
dear, and familiar friends.” Watching television had “a comforting sameness,
using up that portion of your head which would start fretting and worrying if
it wasn’t kept busy.” MacDonald sees the numbing, narcotic effect such
‘entertainments’ have on the masses, and how they lead to indifference,
intolerance and societal decay. People who go through their lives so
disconnected with the world and the people around them leave open the door for
evil to enter. I don’t believe Travis has a television aboard his houseboat, The Busted Flush, though he does make
reference to a number of 1960s and 70s TV shows—Mission Impossible, for example (so Mr. MacDonald must have
one!)
The environment
is another important theme in his work. MacDonald’s concerns are apparent
in an early scene where an egret is struck by the speeding police car, with
Travis handcuffed in the back seat the only one to notice the “white feathers
falling to the roadbed like strange snow.” In another scene, he muses that when
racoons are killed off, either by being run over by cars or by “guns, traps or
poisons”, then the local population of snakes increase, an early nod to need to
preserve our biodiversity, as well as alluding to Travis’s own status as an
outsider, someone on the margins who is nevertheless necessary to deal with society’s ‘snakes’. It is a rather
precarious existence at times.
It was
one of the penalties of playing one of the roles society wants you to play. So
you roam the fringes of the structured society, and it is just fine until they
hold you up to the light. Then, somehow, in their eyes and your, too, you begin
to look like a cat burglar.
Pollution of the environment is a theme
MacDonald incorporates into the novel as seen when Travis uses one of the many
beer cans discarded by the roadside to mark the place where his car went into
the canal, and the sleuth sardonically observes that aluminum is a “[m]iracle
metal. Indestructible. Some day the rows of glittering cans will be piled so
high beside the roads that they will hide the billboards which advertise the
drinkables which come in the aluminum cans.”
Later, when Travis returns to visit Mrs. Arnstead on her small farm, she
draws his attention to the “stink” from the nearby phosphate plant and county
incinerator, and how “‘people are going
to grab their throats and fall down dead all over the state of Floryda’”
because of the effluents, about which
“‘nobody gives a damn.’”
(Incidentally, Travis unpenned her son’s neglected horse and informed
Mrs. Arnstead about the poor state Lew left the animals in, thus saving them
from being put down. Travis would surely be eligible for big, shiny Friends of the Earth medal, though he
would never come to the ceremony to claim his honour, preferring to operate
behind the scenes!)
There is an uncomfortable juxtaposition
between the wild landscape of Florida and the built environment, with its
housing and commercial construction, its roads, garbage, plastic waste and
automobiles. There are descriptions of concrete buildings, strip malls; chain
motels, shops, sheds, shacks, and other structures which convey little sense of
craftsmanship or beauty. Even the interior of Betsy’s house is a clutter of knickknacks
and kitsch, though, interestingly, her small backyard garden and patio are a
place of solace and comfort for Travis in the short time he spends with her
there. For Travis, the built world of humanity, with its cities, roadways and
industries, seems ugly and decadent, no doubt one reason he finds himself
living on the water in a houseboat.
During the course of his investigations
Travis uncovers the rank underbelly of Cypress County, its underlying
corruption, degeneracy, brutality and violence. There is much violence in the
novel, but it is interesting to note that Travis is personally involved in only
two episodes—once when he knocks the psychopathic Lilo unconsciousness and is
forced to kill her partner-in-crime Perris at their trailer, and secondly, when
he is beaten and nearly killed by King Sturnevan. Additionally, Travis does not
give in to revenge. After he subdues and ties up Lilo, whom he suspects has
tortured and murdered Betsy; he leaves her in the trailer and goes to report
the death of Perris to the sheriff. But he ensures that the windows are open so
the interior does not become oppressively hot; Lilo may revel in the sadistic
torture of others, but not Travis. And when King taunts him by describing how
he murdered Betsy, Travis controls his impulse to shoot him. Perhaps it is
because he knows that “[m]aking someone dead is a game for the unimaginative,
for someone who cannot ever really believe they, too, can die. The curse of
empathy is to see yourself in every death, and to see the child hidden in the
body of every corpse.”
He doesn’t kill Lilo because he sees in
her the child she once was and the ‘walking dead’ she has become. He doesn’t
kill King because he can imagine himself as something
more than a killer. As we follow along with Travis, we come upon the evil
others have done, almost like archaeologists unearthing ancient stones engraved
with cryptic writings and inexplicable symbols: The sadistic depravity of Lilo
and Perris and their murderous crimes; King’s killing of Betsy and Lew
Arnstead; Arnstead’s prostitution ring; the stolen race track money and Sheriff
Hyzer’s past indiscretions, are all uncovered by Travis during the course of
his investigations.
The dead are made so by others and it is Travis’s lot to find
out who killed them and why. A corrupt, decaying establishment; personal and
social evils are overcome by our hero who, in the end, retreats to his
houseboat to “retire”—for a time—to heal and to have close around him those he
loves, until once more he must emerge into world to take up the task of slaying
its dragons.
The Green
Ripper © 1979 by John D.
MacDonald Publishing, Inc.
[In the novel no character used scuba gear, and the
action takes place in the foothills of California but…hey…Ed.]
I LIKE READING JOHN D. MACDONALD STORIES (I’ve only recently started taking them up)
partly because they were written in 1950s to 1980s, which for me comes with a
bit of nostalgia attached, and the references he makes to various events and
people bring back memories. In the dialogue between Travis and Meyer, who is a
“world-renowned” economist, they discuss the growing political tensions around
the world such as recent riots in Iran (the story is written just before the
Iranian revolution and the deposing of the Shah). And they talk about various
revolutionary groups operating at the time, such as the PLO, Symbionese
Liberation Army, Red Army Faction, the IRA etc. Meyer, as an economist, agrees with Travis
about his pessimistic outlook concerning the world’s ability to maintain its
current level of consumption and production, with looming famine and social
disorder that are only decades away by his estimate. He even refers to the
seminal 1972 study done by the Club of
Rome* as a reasonable projection of what the future holds in store for
humanity. And oddly enough, in both novels, phosphate is mentioned, and the
environmental damage caused by mining it. It is an example of MacDonald’s
environmental and social concerns that he expresses in much of his work.
In this 1979 novel, MacDonald details a broad, shadowy and violent
political world as Travis investigates the murder of Gretel, the “love of his
life”, and comes in contact with members of a religious cult plotting terrorist
acts within the United States. The individuals are extreme ideologues who kill
indiscriminately (sound familiar?) and they, along with what looks like Russian
aid, are planning a number of coordinated acts of mass killings and the
destruction of infrastructure as a way of destabilising the US. We never learn the full extent of the group’s
plans but they have, according to Travis, a sophisticated, if “paranoid”,
organizational structure with significant resources.
When Gretel is poisoned by a Russian-made
toxin (Novichok, anyone?), Travis goes undercover and infiltrates one
of the group’s training camps in northern California. He gains their trust
disguised as a father looking for his daughter who supposedly had joined the
“Church of the Apocrypha” cult a number of years earlier. He discovers the
group is preparing to embark on a series of random mass killings as a prelude
to larger attacks on various critical facilities (bridges, tunnels, power
stations etc.) throughout the country. He attempts to escape and is spotted
fleeing the camp. At that point Travis resorts to his former military training
and over the course of the day kills ten of the plotters. Travis is driven to
the point of insanity as he is forced to kill again and again in a brutal
struggle for his own survival.
After, he phones a number he had
previously been given and alerts a mysterious, and apparently understaffed and
underfunded government agency (where is Homeland Security when you need it!)
who come to the camp and remove any trace of the cult’s existence, while at the
same time gathering all the information Travis knows about the operation to use
to combat other arms of the terrorist organization.
Having committed so much violence, what he
calls his “own tiny little Jonestown”, [And
for those who don’t know what Jonestown was—gawd! Look it up, people! Ed.]
having lived for weeks disguised under an assumed name and identity, having
lost the woman he loves to murderous cult assassins, Travis doesn’t much care
if he lives or dies, or if the church finds him and comes to kill him; at that
point he just doesn’t care. He seems to have crossed beyond the pale; crossed,
as he imagines in his mind, a steep ravine with dead bodies lying at the
bottom. Behind him, on the other side, is his past innocent life in Lauderdale,
on his house boat with Meyer, with his gin cocktails and “his village” of
boat-dwelling neighbours. On the far side where he is now standing, he doesn’t
know who he is or where he is going; he is at a crossroads. Can he come back and rid himself, as Meyer
puts it, of the “poison” he had to ingest because of the things he needed to do
in order to survive?
In the epilogue, MacDonald has Travis
aboard a yacht, cruising with a woman (natch!)
on his way back to the Bahia Mar
marina. It is several months after his ordeal in California. Travis is
recovering a sense of being alive and enjoying again the pleasures life has to
offer. “I tasted all the tastes of today
and felt in me a rising joy that this could be true. I had raised myself up
from many madnesses to be exactly what I am.” At one point, Travis attempts and
fails to catch a bonefish, and as his fishing line breaks he laughs and wishes
the fish good luck and long life. The bonefish had outwitted him. It had
escaped from what—to the fish—must seem like “monsters”. As Viv comes up from
below deck smiling at him, he says there was “no need for words. Her eyes were
wishing me luck and long life. I had outwitted monsters.” In this case, the
monsters are not only the terrorists, but the one within Travis, himself.
Of course, the idea of terrorism is something that is very
much in the news and on the minds of people today, with grotesque violence
happening it seems nearly daily throughout the world. The idea that such
violence could come to the United States, since the September, 2001 attacks in
New York and Washington, is no longer theoretical or fodder for 1970s’
detective fiction plots. As Max, the mysterious and overworked government agent
tasked with combating threats to national security says:
They can’t keep their tigers waiting forever. And
they have to have something to show the folks helping them from overseas. No
matter how much security we lay on, they are going to create one hell of a
series of bloody messes from border to border and coast to coast. A lot of
sweet dumb people are going to get ripped up. Headlines, speeches, doom, the
end of our way of life, and so on. Terrorism is going to pay us one big fat
bloody visit, McGee. But it will only be a visit. They underestimate our
national resilience. Aroused by that kind of savagery, we can become a very
tough kind of people. You’re a pretty good example of that.
As the years have proved, the United States is indeed not
immune from terrorism. But threats to the country as a whole are beyond the
‘remit’ for someone like Travis McGee who is as apolitical as he can get, and
though his job is still to fight ‘monsters’, he will stick with the smaller,
more personal, variety.
...
...
SOME QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL stand out for me. After Gretel dies, a grief stricken
Travis leaves the hospital:
Whispering drone of light traffic on University
Drive, lights in moving patterns. Grinding whine of trucks moving fast, a mile
or so away. Random night wind clattering palm fronds. This was the world, bustling
its way on through its allotted four billion more years of time, carrying its
four billion souls gracelessly onward. A lot of them had stopped tonight, some
I blood and terror. I tried to comprehend the enormity—the obscenity—of the
fact that Gretel Howard had been one of them.
And
Travis’s thoughts on the healing power of friendship and community:
My village and my people. They seemed to know what
I needed most, as sense of place, the feeling of belonging to some kind of
resilient society. A man can play the
game of being the loner, moving unscathed through an indifferent world,
toughened by the diminished expectations of his place and time.
Finally,
Travis’s assessment of the world’s current and future state of affairs, again
with MacDonald’s environmental and political concerns front and center:
There are four billion people in the world, and
each day more and more of them are dying in bloody and sickening way. The pot
is beginning to simmer….
The real world is out there in a slow dreadful
process of change. There is a final agony of millions out there, and one and a
quarter million new souls arriving every week. We try to think about it less
than we used to.
[The title comes from something
Travis heard as a boy. He misheard his parents when they spoke about the “Grim
Reaper”, hearing “Green Ripper” instead. In this story, Travis becomes the
Green Ripper.]
The Empty
Copper Sea© 1978 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.
I READ THE
EMPTY COPPER SEA after I’d read The Green Ripper. In part, it is a story
about how Travis first meets Gretel, later killed in the Green Ripper novel. The story is a typical Travis McGee
solve-the-problem(s); find-the-bad-guy tale and comes with his usual mixture of
cunning, keen observational skills, practical insights into human character and
motivation, raw physical courage, as well as a dollop of self-reflection and
self-doubt. (Hey, who needs a Superman, anyway?) I loved the book jacket cover
with its photo of the sea as the sun and clouds change it to that glowing
copper colour towards sunset, and that was when I decided to write a book
review on JDD’s novel. Then I realized I already had done a couple last year.
(Cool! Time saver!)
The plot is basically one where Travis
travels to Timber Bay, Florida in order to investigate the disappearance of a
millionaire developer and the circumstances which led to the charge of
negligence for Travis’s client, Van Harder, and to redeem for the man his
tattered reputation. So, getting astride his steed in his car and taking up his lance his gun, and
traveling with his squire, Sancho Panza, steadfast companion, Meyer, the brilliant,
“world-renowned” economist, they set out to tilt at windmills do their
good deeds.
Much of the sleuthing in Travis McGee
stories occurs during his ‘interviews’ with people where, through a mixture of
deception, intimidation and sometimes frank honesty, he is able to gain
information and clues which lead his investigation forward. In this case,
Travis is trying to find out whether the millionaire, Hubbard, actually fell
overboard while cruising on his yacht captained by now-disgraced Van Harder,
and if he didn’t, if Hubbard, in fact, faked his own drowning, where was he?
Sometimes during the course of his
inquiries, Travis expresses remorse or regret that he must role-play, deceive
or otherwise manipulate people in order to get what he needs. In the Empty
Copper Sea his self-doubt is raw and exposed to the point where he
questions the validity of his role as a “salvage operator”. (It is a
tongue-in-cheek reference for Travis’s ‘job’. Travis salvages within the
ruins and broken foundations of people’s lives in order to rescue what he can.)
Travis says:
I can’t wait that long. I feel as if some
absolutely unimaginable catastrophe was getting itself ready to happen. And I
feel as if, for no reason in the world, I was going to suddenly—for god’s
sake—start crying!
Even
Superman has to go the Fortress of
Solitude to recharge his batteries from time to time. His friend, Meyer, a keen Travis observer, comments and
tells our hero that what he does for individuals who have no place else to
turn, is important and necessary. He adds, in his usual quirky, analytical
phrasing, that “all organized systems tend to slide slowly into chaos and
disorder. Energy tends to run down. The universe itself heads inevitably toward
darkness and stasis.” He goes on, noting that a Belgian mathematician used the
analogy of a walled city to express the second law of thermodynamics Meyer
outlined:
He used the analogy of a walled city and an open
city. The walled city, isolated from its surroundings, will run down, decay and
die. The open city will have an exchange of material and energy a with its
surroundings and will become larger and more complex, capable of dissipating
energy even as it grows. I have been thinking that it would not warp the
analogy too badly to extend it to a single individual.
When
Travis argues that he is more like an open city than most people, Meyer
continues:
In a physical sense, but you are
not decaying in any physical sense…you are walled, in an emotional sense. There
is no genuine give-and-take. There is no real involvement, lately. You are
going through the motions. You are vaguely predatory lately. And irritable. And
listless. You are getting no emotional feedback.
But when
Travis meets Gretel he feels, “as if I had shucked some kind of drab outer
skin. It was old and brittle, and as I stretched and moved, it shattered and
fell off. I could breathe more deeply. The Gulf was a sharper blue. There was
wine in the air…” (Ah, love!) So we see that the love of a good woman, and
righting a wrong, and a fight or two, (and having to kill someone—in self
defense, of course!) all put Travis back on a more even keel.
All in all the novel a pleasant summer
read, or a crawl away pleasure under the covers for mid-winter.
I’ll
conclude with a couple of nice descriptions of Florida, something that
MacDonald does so well:
We
went out and explored the city in the fading light of evening, drifting the
gray Dodge back and forth through the social and commercial strata, snuffling
the flavors of change, the plastic aromas of the new Florida superimposed on
the Spanish moss, the rain-sounds of the night peepers in the mars, the sea
smell of low tides, creak of bamboo in light winds, fright cry of the cruising
night birds, tiny sirens of the mosquitoes, faraway flicker of lightning
silhouetting the circus parade of thunder heads on the Gulf
horizon—superimposed on all these old enduring things, known when only Caloosas
made their shell mounds and slipped through the sawgrass in their dugouts. Here
now was the faint petrochemical stinkings, a perpetual farting of the great god
Progress. And a wang-dang thudding of bubblegum rock from the speakers
on the poles in the shopping-plaza parking lot.
When
Travis comes upon what he assumes to be the dead body of Gretel lying in a sand
dune:
A great desolation chilled my heart. It was an
emptiness stretching from here to infinity, from now to eternity.
Slowly, slowly the whole world was suffused with
that strange orange glow which happens rarely toward sunset. The clouds turned
to gold as the sun moved behind them, and the reflection of the clouds colored
the earth. I have never seen the Gulf so quiet. There were no ripples, no
birds, no sign of feeding fish, no offshore vessels moving across the horizon.
I had seen this strange coppery light in Tahiti, in Ceylon (before it became
Sri Lanka), and in Granada and the Grenadines. The world must have looked like
that before the first creatures came crawling out of the salt water to spawn on
the empty land. I turned my head and saw, beyond the shoulder of my beloved,
the empty copper sea, hushed and waiting, as if the world had paused between
breaths. Perhaps it was like this in the beginning, and will be like this
again, after man has slain every living thing. Sand, heat, and water. And
death.
*The Limits
to Growth, 1972. Authors: Donella
and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, William W. Behrens. Published by The Club of Rome. The MIT research team used
computer simulations to study the effects of “exponential economic and
population growth with a finite supply of resources”:
After reviewing their computer simulations, the
research team came
to the following conclusions,
1.
Given business as usual, i.e., no changes to
historical growth trends, the limits to growth on earth would become evident
by 2072, leading to "sudden and uncontrollable decline in both
population and industrial capacity".
2.
Growth trends existing in 1972 could be altered so that sustainable ecological and economic
stability could be achieved.
3.
The sooner the world's people start striving for
the second outcome above, the better the chance of achieving it.
|
In the decades
following the book’s publication, which went on to become an international best
seller, there was considerable pushback concerning the team’s findings, with
many pointing to the “doomsday” scenarios of its conclusions, and how the
expected “expiry dates” (of certain mineral resources, for example) did not
happen exactly as the computer model predicted. Globalization, rapid oil, gas
and mineral exploration, and advances in industrial and agricultural production
(i.e. the “green revolution”) seemed to suggest that technology and human
ingenuity would be able to solve the problems of resource depletion, population
growth and unchecked continuous industrial expansion.
However, by the 1990s (and especially
after the 1992 Rio de Janeiro EarthSummit conference)
retrospective examinations began to shed a more favorable light on the group’s
findings:
In the early years of the 21st century, the tide of
opinion regarding LTG began to swing in a positive direction. Reading LTG
for the first time in 2000, influential energy economist Matthew Simmons concluded his views on the
report by saying, "In hindsight, The Club of Rome turned out to be right. We simply wasted 30 important years ignoring
this work.”
A helpful recent review of LTG is from The Guardian newspaper here:
And thanks to Wikipedia, as
always, for letting me cut and paste to my heart’s content!
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