Book Review: John Steinbeck: The Red Pony

The Red Pony is a novella broken down into four episodes outlining the maturing of a young adolescent boy. The stories all take place on the ranch belonging to the child's father. Each episode presents the child with a challenge, be it phyiscal or emotional. And with each challenge the child adjusts and responds in an independent manner and not just in reflection of his father. It's a delicately written story, with not much in the way of detail, rather it is a story with a moral. Within the space of a hundred pages we see the young child develop into a young man. An interesting read with some rarely examined growing pains. Beautifully written in Steinbeck's inimmitable prose and a stark outline of the hardships of growing up in a young California.

Steinbeck, John: Cannery Row

What a delight to return to Steinbeck's California, and where better than the warm, but ultimately wizzened Monterey. Cannery row is a story about a place and life therein, a place not necessarily like home, but with a familiar intimacy nontheless.

At the Western frontier of the world, in one of the gloomier sectors of America's history, is Cannery Row. No imagery can do better justice to Cannery Row than Steinbeck's own tidepool analogue. It is a tightly-packed microcosm of symbiotic relationships, where each character is as distinct as the lifeforms that populate a tidepool. Each with average characteristics, mundane outlooks and flatlined prospects. But alongside the darkness and solitude, lives beauty, life and balance. The story is about that equilibirum that keeps the community anchored and the inter-dependencies between the struggling creatures that populate the Row. How they rely on one another for life outside existence. Mack and the boys, with their bare-bones lifestyle, stripped of complexities, luxuries and constrictions, Doc with his fine-tuned life-in-statis, and the girls at the whore house with their patchwork quilt. Each esentially lacking the basic glue that binds mankind in intimate relationships, instead binding themselves to the community. Economy figures highly in the daily events, but is carefully tamed and controlled. Simplicity, the very essence of Cannery Row, dictates one input and one output. Shopping away from Lee's store (a wonder in itself, stocking all a Cannery Row inhabitant could desire) is as unfamiliar and undesirable as working in the Canneries. Instead the inhabitants rely on the tidepools.

Perhaps my favourite concept in Cannery Row is the inclusion of a series of interchapters; tiny stories lived in Cannery Row, inconsequential to the plot. These wonderful little sculptures, just momentarily, give you time to blink and see the tidepool from a different perspective. The most significant of these is the story of the gopher, and his doomed paradise - a stark outline of reality against fantasy which stimulates an empathy localised to Steinbeck's tales. The bleak acceptance that the characters have of life within their own world is quite typical of Steinbeck's work; the paralysis of the American Dream; a time when dreams had lost their currency. Though the depression was only transient, it lasted long enough that people had to build a life within it. Perhaps Cannery row is America through a macro lens. A simple story with isolated, grayscale characters brought into technicolor by basic human emotion, resulting in an blurred montage of stunted ideology. Community is a sense quite frequently alien today, perhaps due to a requirement for it that is equally diminished. Steinbeck captures a nook of history and community and lets us wade in it, just for a while. Then we slip off our waders and forget the uneventful, inconsequential life that was Cannery Row as the high tide comes and sweeps it away.

Dickens, Charles: Hard Times

Except maybe Shakespeare, is there an author more famous than Dickens? How many other authors have been immortalised through the adjectivisation* of their name? I think that really must be the definition of fame and celebrity; the adjectivisation of one's name; Marxism, Newtonian, Cartesian, Leninism, Dickensian. Kafka almost gets there, with Kafka-esque, and a number of philosophers and sociologists do, but few storytellers (Clancian, Grishamian? Come on!).

Hard times is set in an imaginary industrial, British any-town. Like many of Dickens' books, it focusses less on the elite, and more on the lower-classes, I'm sure this must be a reason for its popularity. It observes the discourse and interactions that emerge from circumstance. Hard times is not richly plotted nor overly complex, it is a linear plot but crafted with such care that each paragraph is like a poem in itself. The characters are rich, realistic and individual with such traits as to make them believable. There exist three environments in literature, the now, the then and the alternative. The then, or the historic, is rendered with such detail and accuracy that you really feel like you are observing these places and people rather than a pithy echo.

I feel it is often easier to empathise with those whose plight is more desperate which often amounts to those down on their luck. In turn, it is frequently the case that 'down on their luck' is synonymous with having little money. This is part of Dickens' magic, he gets to the raw nerve, talks to you on a one-to-one basis. Him and I understand the same things, that's what I like. Perhaps this is why people often compare Dickens to King, though this may be doing Dickens a disservice (Steinbeck would fit the bill better in my opinion), it is clear how the comparison is made.

I think in the future when reviewing Dickens' books I will have to start on the basis of the plot, much like comparing King's books, the style should be taken for granted. In that case by self-comparison, this is not one of Dickens's greatest, the plot is not outstanding, the characters only marginally memorable. But, still a classic book.


*I don't think this is a word, but the English language is not that prescriptive!