Review: The Human Condition
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 14, 2012
Desolate is a fast-paced, thrilling and modern story. Modern in the sense that it is relevant with our time. I've read here and there that some people think the story is too short, or the characters not developed enough. Actually, I think Robert Brumm did the right thing by cutting everything to the bone (metaphorically speaking), as it made the action gain in terms of rhythm. Had he added more descriptions and details, everything would have been slowed down and it wouldn't have worked quite the same. Novels can't be written the same way for ever: in the 19th, Balzac could spend two pages describing a chair. No one could stand that today. Moreover, simple descriptions leave more room to the reader's imagination, which is fitting in a story meant to be frightening. As for the length, there's something about today's fast-paced society that makes us crave shorter works of fiction. Think of the success of series on TV: I think the format chosen in Desolate is really satisfying.As a young author, Robert Brumm is a "product" of his time, and is thus influenced by TV series and films. Desolate is a mix of many of these, like a homage to all the stories we love (Lost, Alien...) and the author knows that we will see the references. That's why I don't think he needs to describe more than he does: the reader can fill in the blanks because he is in a familiar territory (even if paradoxically he isn't, stranded on this island with the characters...). SPOILER ALERT: the following paragraph is filled with spoilers.That's why so many things happen in so few pages too: Howard loses his woman, his job, goes mad and kills his boss and a family, ends up in the worst prison on Earth (a desert island), meets crazy convicts and crazy guards. That would be Part I. Then a strange door is found in an underground place, behind which there's a spaceship, out of which both an alien and a virus come out, killing everyone in the place... The accumulation could be absurd and ridiculous. It's actually not: it is voluntary and the result is close to what the movie Scream accomplished: scaring the s--- out of you while being funny and paraphrasing all the horror films.The chain of events, this downward spiral Howard is going through, is so exaggerated as to acquire epic, mythological proportions. Like a modern-day, negative double of Ulysses, he goes from one bad thing to a worse one. The tragic element springing from the fact that he brought (almost) everything upon himself. It's like an allegory of Life when things start going wrong.Robert Brumm knows what he is doing, in other words. The story may look simple at first, but it's up to the reader to bring their own interpretation to it, because it's open enough to do so. Hence the (apparent) simplicity, like what you can find in a fairy tale. The choice of an island as a starting point is not at random either. From The Lord of the Flies or The Island of Dr. Moreau to Lost, islands allow the author to place his characters in a specifically secluded surrounding, where only terrible things can happen. Such is the Human Condition, the definition of which, and that will be my conclusion, fits Desolate on every point:"The human condition encompasses the unique and believed to be inescapable features of being human in a social, cultural, and personal context. It can be described as the irreducible part of humanity that is inherent and not connected to factors such as gender, race or class. It includes concerns such as the meaning of life, search for gratification, sense of curiosity, the inevitability of isolation, or Thanatophobia (the fear of death)."(Wikipedia)