Book Review: "I Am Legend"
Nov. 21st, 2008 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asterrocI finally got around to reading the 1954 post-apocalyptic novel by Richard Matheson upon which the 2007 film starring Will Smith was loosely based.
If you didn't want to read the spoilers below, my summary is that the novel's good in an entirely different way from the film.
The movie is very loosely based upon the novel - it's more than "inspired by", but definitely doesn't follow entirely. In the novel, the monsters are more like vampires than zombies, and we know from the very start that they have intelligence as protagonist Robert Neville's carpool buddy Ben Cortman is the "leader" of the vampires, and has a nightly routine of calling "Come out, Neville!"
The movie is a typical zombie flick, with bits of pathos and flashbacks to make Smith's character of Neville more sympathetic. The themes are survival and fighting zombies. The novel on the other hand is heavily influenced by the Cold War era and is introspective about what makes someone human.
Novel Neville is NOT a sympathetic character. Through flashbacks we learn that he started off his life as a factory worker fighting against his father's intellectual (and dare I say elitist?) scientist legacy, making a happy family with his wife Virginia and daughter Cathy (or Kathy? never know from audiobooks) as they struggle to live in a post-nuclear war society. As the nuclear-war torn US slowly falls apart due to frequent dust storms and insect plagues, people are becoming infected with some unknown disease.
By the time Neville's daughter Cathy succumbs, the nation has instituted mandatory burnings of corpses to help curb the spread, and Cathy is brought to the fire in the center of the city (which for reasons unexplained continues to burn without tending for the next 3 years of the novel). When Virginia succumbs, society is beginning to crumble, and Neville steals neighbor and carpool buddy Cortman's car to bring Virginia to a field to bury, instead of burning her as required. The next day she comes back home.
The novel opens with Neville continuing to struggle to survive a few months after Virginia's death, by which time he appears to be the only human left. By day he searches for and executes the vampires and chain smokes. By night he sharpens stakes and binge drinks. At first the novel skirts descriptions of killing the vampires, saying that he entered the room and performed his distasteful task - after all, if he didn't, they'd kill him. As time passes more descriptions are added as the rationalizations are dropped. At no point in time do we ever question the intelligence of the vampires - they speak, they remember their religions, they know Neville's name, they know to destroy his generator, the women attempt to seduce him - only their sanity.
As more time passes, Neville's rage-filled drinking binges become worse and worse by night, and by day he teaches himself biology to start searching for a cure to stave off his growing suicidal rages. He even finds himself sexually tempted by the women vampires, disgustingly. At this point the reader is thoroughly loathing Neville - until he finds a break in his life by attempting to befriend a dog he finds (the inspiration for Will Smith's Neville's Sam). This break from his descent makes it even worse when the dog dies and Neville relapses into his rage and alcoholism. When he begins experimenting upon the vampires, his alcoholism subsides.
Years pass with his research slowly progressing when it does at all, when he finds another living human, Ruth. When he chases and catches her, Ruth is terrified, and the reader sees just how alien Neville has become. Neville is deep in paranoia, and insists on testing Ruth's blood in the morning to find out whether she is infected. When she agrees and asks fearfully what he can do if she is infected, he begins telling her of his experiments - a disgustingly clinical series of his trials (do they have to be staked in the heart? what about a shoulder? do Jewish vampires respond to the Torah instead of a cross? does the scent of garlic or an injection have a greater effect?) Ruth as a normal person is made faint by his descriptions - to her basic human decency is more crucial than the systematic investigation.
In the morning with the test, we find that Ruth *is* in fact infected. She brains Neville and escapes, leaving a note: the infected have found a cure, and most of the vampires Neville has been killing during the day have been normal people, going about their somewhat changed lives, living in fear of the monster Neville himself. Neville decides to submit himself to the new society's justice, and they take him brutally, shooting him in the chest after gleefully slaughtering the uncured zombies on his front lawn. The novel ends with a bit of a soliloquy by Ruth, an officer in the new society, about how their brutality is justified for their survival, and Neville's introspection that he has spawned a new generation of legends as he downs a suicide pill.
What gets to me about the novel is the theme of how war and brutality are dehumanizing, but also the conflicting notion that brutality is often required to survive at all. The novel does *not* resolve the tension between these two ideas at all. There's also the notion that anyone is capable of anything - the same person is a brutal killer and teaches himself to be an effective research biologist with nothing but library books and a stolen microscope.
Okay, that came out really lengthy. If you don't want to read the novel eventually, at least give the film's alternate ending a gander.
If you didn't want to read the spoilers below, my summary is that the novel's good in an entirely different way from the film.
The movie is very loosely based upon the novel - it's more than "inspired by", but definitely doesn't follow entirely. In the novel, the monsters are more like vampires than zombies, and we know from the very start that they have intelligence as protagonist Robert Neville's carpool buddy Ben Cortman is the "leader" of the vampires, and has a nightly routine of calling "Come out, Neville!"
The movie is a typical zombie flick, with bits of pathos and flashbacks to make Smith's character of Neville more sympathetic. The themes are survival and fighting zombies. The novel on the other hand is heavily influenced by the Cold War era and is introspective about what makes someone human.
Novel Neville is NOT a sympathetic character. Through flashbacks we learn that he started off his life as a factory worker fighting against his father's intellectual (and dare I say elitist?) scientist legacy, making a happy family with his wife Virginia and daughter Cathy (or Kathy? never know from audiobooks) as they struggle to live in a post-nuclear war society. As the nuclear-war torn US slowly falls apart due to frequent dust storms and insect plagues, people are becoming infected with some unknown disease.
By the time Neville's daughter Cathy succumbs, the nation has instituted mandatory burnings of corpses to help curb the spread, and Cathy is brought to the fire in the center of the city (which for reasons unexplained continues to burn without tending for the next 3 years of the novel). When Virginia succumbs, society is beginning to crumble, and Neville steals neighbor and carpool buddy Cortman's car to bring Virginia to a field to bury, instead of burning her as required. The next day she comes back home.
The novel opens with Neville continuing to struggle to survive a few months after Virginia's death, by which time he appears to be the only human left. By day he searches for and executes the vampires and chain smokes. By night he sharpens stakes and binge drinks. At first the novel skirts descriptions of killing the vampires, saying that he entered the room and performed his distasteful task - after all, if he didn't, they'd kill him. As time passes more descriptions are added as the rationalizations are dropped. At no point in time do we ever question the intelligence of the vampires - they speak, they remember their religions, they know Neville's name, they know to destroy his generator, the women attempt to seduce him - only their sanity.
As more time passes, Neville's rage-filled drinking binges become worse and worse by night, and by day he teaches himself biology to start searching for a cure to stave off his growing suicidal rages. He even finds himself sexually tempted by the women vampires, disgustingly. At this point the reader is thoroughly loathing Neville - until he finds a break in his life by attempting to befriend a dog he finds (the inspiration for Will Smith's Neville's Sam). This break from his descent makes it even worse when the dog dies and Neville relapses into his rage and alcoholism. When he begins experimenting upon the vampires, his alcoholism subsides.
Years pass with his research slowly progressing when it does at all, when he finds another living human, Ruth. When he chases and catches her, Ruth is terrified, and the reader sees just how alien Neville has become. Neville is deep in paranoia, and insists on testing Ruth's blood in the morning to find out whether she is infected. When she agrees and asks fearfully what he can do if she is infected, he begins telling her of his experiments - a disgustingly clinical series of his trials (do they have to be staked in the heart? what about a shoulder? do Jewish vampires respond to the Torah instead of a cross? does the scent of garlic or an injection have a greater effect?) Ruth as a normal person is made faint by his descriptions - to her basic human decency is more crucial than the systematic investigation.
In the morning with the test, we find that Ruth *is* in fact infected. She brains Neville and escapes, leaving a note: the infected have found a cure, and most of the vampires Neville has been killing during the day have been normal people, going about their somewhat changed lives, living in fear of the monster Neville himself. Neville decides to submit himself to the new society's justice, and they take him brutally, shooting him in the chest after gleefully slaughtering the uncured zombies on his front lawn. The novel ends with a bit of a soliloquy by Ruth, an officer in the new society, about how their brutality is justified for their survival, and Neville's introspection that he has spawned a new generation of legends as he downs a suicide pill.
What gets to me about the novel is the theme of how war and brutality are dehumanizing, but also the conflicting notion that brutality is often required to survive at all. The novel does *not* resolve the tension between these two ideas at all. There's also the notion that anyone is capable of anything - the same person is a brutal killer and teaches himself to be an effective research biologist with nothing but library books and a stolen microscope.
Okay, that came out really lengthy. If you don't want to read the novel eventually, at least give the film's alternate ending a gander.
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Date: 2008-11-22 03:27 pm (UTC)