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Ok… so I am a little behind schedule but it’s not the end of the world!  Oh wait…

ba dum ching….

Ooo, ok, that was bad…. moving on…

I want to start out by saying that I’m really not into post apocalyptic stories.  The idea of getting vaporized in a massive solar flare or battling the bastard mutants born of radiation and genocide terrifies me.  I mean literally, terrifies me.  I get panic attacks just thinking about it.  The whole “it could happen”  thing (no matter how remote the actual possibility may be) gets my crazy hyperactive imagination going so fast I can’t think straight.  I start planning my survival and writing shopping lists and wondering if the land lord would let me dig a fall out shelter in the back yard.  How might one store a thousand 2.5 gallon jugs of bottled water, anyway?  I could definitely live off of kipper snacks and mini raviolis for a while.  But what do I do about toilet paper?  Wait, where was I going with this?

Right, so, I’m not really into post apocalyptic stories, but I have to say, I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!  It’s a brilliant testament of the human spirit.  It beautifully captures the astonishing power the human will has to not only survive, but to thrive and restore.  Alas, Babylon is a flawlessly choreographed dance between tragedy and humor.  I often found myself so lost within it’s pages that I had a hard time coming out of the story.  I would go on walks with my dogs, see a stray cat and think, “Is it friendly?  Can we eat it?”.  Ok, maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic, but, seriously, a very very good story.

For those of you who did not do the assignment (you know who you are), Alas, Babylon takes place at the height of the Cold War in a small Florida town called Fort Repose.  Our main guy (or “protagonist” if you will) is Randolph Rowzee Bragg.  He is a 30 year old bachelor, failed small time politician and living off of old family money that has long since run out.  His brother, Mark, is a big wig in some super secret Air Force something or other and has crazy security clearance.  He sends an emergency telegram to Randy telling him to meet him at a nearby air base right away.  Basically, what Mark tells Randy is this.  The world as we know it is going to end.  And it is going to end very soon.  He gives Randy a large sum of money for supplies and tells him that he is sending his wife and 2 children to Fort Repose later that night.  Randy spends the next few hours running around town, Chicken Little style, warning everyone that matters to him that the sky is falling.  The next morning, the first bombs hit, all major world cities are wiped out, and chaos ensues.  The rest of the novel follows Randy and his community over the course of the next year as they learn to adapt to life in a broken world.

The story itself, is nothing too special.  Maybe it was in 1959 when it was first published, but I grew up in a world of sci fi, Star Trek, and sadly, Armageddon.  What really makes this book so wonderful is not the plot, but the characters.  Pat Frank created some really loveable characters which we get to know by Frank’s fluid shifts in perspective.  The whole colony on River Road feels like people you know in your own life.  By the end of the book, you really feel like you are part of the family.  I hold a particular fondness for the children in the story, Ben Franklin and Peyton Bragg (aged 13 and 11 respectively).  My parents would have been around the same ages as the children when the book was written.  It really puts things into perspective when I think of those kids as being my parents’ contemporaries.

Something else I found surprising considering when this book was published are the women in the story.  Every single female character from little Peyton to Randy’s promiscuous ex-girlfriend, Rita Hernandez, is intelligent, independent and level headed.  The colony on River Road would have fallen apart in days had it not been for the resourceful Helen Bragg.  Had it not been for Rita Hernandez’s ability to capitalize on every situation, Fort Repose would have been over run by murderous highway men.  These resilient, amazing women really make the story for me.  It would have been very easy for Frank to take these women to hysterical heights of super co-dependency in a disastrous situation.  Instead, he created dignified, strong women who were vital to the survival and well being of the community of Fort Repose.

I could go on in an in depth analysis about how brave Pat Frank was in exploring how, in a mushroom cloud haze, all men (and women) are created equal, rendering segregation not only pointless but down right counter productive… but I won’t.  Not today.  I would have liked Pat Frank to be a little bit bolder when writing about the Henry’s and gone into more detail about who they were, but he didn’t.  He was taking a huge risk writing about them the way he did.  Had he gone too deep into the issue of civil rights he may have lost his major audience when the book hit the shelves.  He tried to subtly make a point with out pissing off too many white American readers in the late 1950s.  He did ok, but that is my only major criticism.  Not too shabby for Mr. Frank.

All in all, this is an incredibly well written book that I would have never read had I not decided to do this project.  I highly recommend it to anyone who needs a jump start.  This book, despite its painfully bleak premise, is very uplifting at times, especially toward the end.  Though it doesn’t have a happy ending exactly, it leaves the reader filled with a sense hope and promise.  The world is broken, but the human spirit is not.  We will survive.  We will rebuild.  We will over come.  This is especially on my mind as we draw closer to the 10th anniversary of 9-11.  Although, 9-11 may not have had as wide an impact on the world as “The Day”, it is a terrifying reminder that fiction and fact are close bedfellows and that maybe we should learn all we can from bed time stories.  Sometimes there really are monsters hiding under the bed.

Aaaaaand speaking of monsters… I will begin work on the dreaded Mythology by Edith Hamilton next.  I am going to give myself through next weekend (June 18th & 19th) to finish this one.  As some of you know, I have taken great pains to avoid reading this book for almost as long as I can remember (yes, my parents tried to get me to read it almost as soon as I could recite the alphabet).  It’s long, it’s dry, it has small type.  I will need a little time to wade through it all.  But!! I will post little mini blog updates in the mean time.

Take care!