Out in the Open (2013)
Jesús Carrasco (1972)
226 pages
One pleasure while reading is the serendipitous discovery of connections to what one has learned before, in books, podcasts or elsewhere. Triggered by a particular scene, setting or discussion, or perhaps more generally by the developing story, an image or scene or plot or idea from an earlier piece will burst forth out of some corner of memory, adding depth and breadth to what one is currently reading. Just such connections occurred to me repeatedly in Jesús Carrasco’s gripping --- and devastating --- novel Out in the Open.
A boy lies silently in a hole in the dirt of an olive orchard as the story opens. Covered by the twigs and branches that he has pulled over his hiding place, he listens intently to the calls of the men from his village searching for him. One of these men, the bailiff, strikes particular fear in the boy, for reasons that only become apparent as the story develops. The boy’s dogged determination to avoid capture despite the many hours he must endure in his tiny, damp burro hint at these dreadful realities that have motivated his drastic action.When the men eventually give up, and the boy feels he has waited long enough to be certain that the last of them has left, he emerges from his hole and walks out of the grove, leaving his family and village behind. Beyond having dug his hiding place in advance, and brought along a little food, he has but the vaguest of plans. Heading north in search of a new life, he walks in the direction of the North Star, in part to keep from walking in circles, and in part seeking out an imagined promise land, far from the misery of his present life.
And we soon learn that that misery goes far beyond the personal trials the boy faces at home. The broader region of the unnamed country in which the boy lives has suffered from a fearsome and extended drought that, in the short lifetime of the boy, has left his village isolated and impoverished. Never before having been farther from home than to the neighboring olive grove, the boy walks out onto parched and barren plains driven as much by fear as hope.
Alone and all too soon at the end of his food and strength, the boy finally catches the break he needs, stumbling across an old goatherd who takes him in. Having never known anyone who could be fully trusted, the boy warms only slowly to the old man, initially remaining with him more out of desperation than preference. His reticence gradually softens, however, as it becomes clear that his pursuers will not abandon their prey without a fight, and he his need for the goatherd deepens. Ultimately the pair bond around their fight for survival as they move on across the desolate countryside.
Carrasco tells the story from the point of view of the boy; a youth of uncertain age, he clearly does not yet have the strength of a young man, yet he has learned some work skills, and so could be perhaps ten or twelve years old. Though hardened by the ugly experiences that precipitated his decision to run away, the boy remains in many ways innocent and naïve, with little knowledge of the outside world, and so telling the story through his eyes allows Carrasco to keep many of the details vague. Though there are hints that point to the story being set in Carrasco’s native Spain, nothing clearly pinpoints the location. The old goatherd is for his part also of uncertain age and without a back story, and the bailiff and those of his posse appear simply as a kind of merciless evil rolling out over an equally unforgiving landscape.
The causes and extent of the drought also remain unclear, again a reality that the boy simply recognizes as a fact of his existence, its origins unimportant to his current dilemma. He does clearly recognize, however, the breakdown in order that has resulted from so many having left the region, with any external authority either non-existent or at best unconcerned with life in the village or the region in general. Those who have stayed have been abandon to their own devices.
Though as the story opens it can be natural to assume that it takes place in the past, as the extent of the devastation to the environment and the dissolution of society become clear, the novel takes on a bit of the flavor of an imagined apocalyptic future, such as in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. Not quite McCarthy’s nuclear winter, certainly, but nonetheless, a youth and a man, fighting for survival as they travel across a bleak and barren landscape in the hope of a better life.
Returning to the theme with which I opened this review, several other novels, beyond The Road, also struck parallels. I recently read Mick Kitson’s Sal (my review linked to at right), which features as its title character a young girl escaping a similar nightmare to what the boy faces, though
she flees into a mountainous reserve in Scotland that seems almost idyllic in comparison to the devastated landscape through which the boy passes. Then too, as compared to the boy, Sal has had (or managed to obtain) the resources necessary to carefully plan her escape, and she has a take-no-prisoners attitude that could not be more different from the boy, whose strict --- by implication religious --- upbringing leave him questioning any impulse to fight back. In both books, however, young lives upended by an abusive home life take courage in hand and seek out a better life.
In Anna Kavan’s Ice (my review linked to at left), apocalyptic weather changes create an unforgiving dystopia, though a frozen dessert not a parched one, and clearly on a global scale in this case, without the promise of escape that motivates the boy’s path northward in Carrasco’s novel. The two novels also share the uncertainties introduced by an unreliable narrator, though for entirely different reasons, as well as settings and characters that remain unspecified and vague. For both Carrasco and Kavan, the intent in their novels seems to be to focus a reader tightly on the psychological story of the main characters by stripping away as much as possible details of place and time.
Like Carrasco’s story, J.M.G. LeClézio’s Desert (my review linked to at right) tells of a flight across an arid and unforgiving landscape, though in LeClézio’s novel a tribe flees a marauding army. For LeClézio, however, while the desert can be unforgiving, he also makes clear the magnificent beauty to be found there, particularly in his descriptions of the light in the desert. For the boy in Carrasco’s story, the barren land he crosses seems to offer no redeeming virtues, and the sunlight is simply a danger to be survived. Nevertheless, however beautiful the desert LeClézio’s characters pass through, they share with the boy and his companion the goatherd harrowing lives, with a thin and uncertain line between life and death, as they escape from natural and human forces that seem equally merciless.In Out In the Open, Carrasco has written a powerful story that will haunt a reader both with the horrors faced by an innocent boy, and more broadly with the implications of a world in which changes in climate have laid waste to entire regions of the globe, leaving governments unable to uniformly exercise the structures and controls fundamental to maintain the civilization so many have come to see as a natural birthright.
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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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