* JULY 11, 2009

Five Best
These novels about arduous journeys are transporting, says Rose Tremain


By ROSE TREMAIN

1. As I Lay Dying
By William Faulkner
Jonathan Cape, 1930

The Bundren family, poor white farmers in Mississippi, attempts to keep
a pledge to its dead matriarch, Addie, to bury her with her kin a
hundred miles away. The coffin is put aboard a mule-drawn wagon, and the
Bundrens climb in and set off—just as a storm sweeps in, drenching the
travelers and raising the river levels. Every jolt and tip of the cart
is felt by the reader in this anguished under­taking, but William
Faulkner is charting far more than a hazardous journey. At its core,
“As I Lay Dying” is a powerful story of ­domestic entropy, a tale
­perfectly served by its elliptical, multi-voiced narration, in which
nobody is ­listening to anybody else. As Addie’s body ­begins to
putrefy and buzzards start to circle under the leaden sky, as the wagon
is almost lost in the swollen Mississippi, so the secrets and lies of
the Bundrens are washed up on some lonely and silent shore, where,
still, no individual cry can be heard.

2. Voss
By Patrick White
Viking, 1957

In this novel set in Australia in the 1840s, Johann Voss, a German
exile, sets off with a motley team of men to explore the unmapped
outback. As he travels deeper into this hostile world, Voss struggles to
understand the nature of the sudden and blinding love that overtook him
just before his departure, when he fell for Laura Trevelyan, an orphaned
young woman shunned in her uncle’s household for her obstinate
cleverness. Voss has undertaken his arduous journey in the belief that
suffering will make him a saint—a faith that both attracts and repels
the men he leads, as it does his beloved. Persecuted by every
tribulation the intemperate wilderness can inflict, oppressed by dreams
of normality and sexual happiness, surrounded by dying animals and an
­increasingly mutinous crew, Voss stumbles on. Sensing her lover’s
torments from afar, Laura—who has taken her dead maid’s child, Mercy,
as her own—falls gravely ill with a brain fever. She ­recovers only
when all hope for Voss’s return is abandoned. Patrick White, who died
in 1990, won the 1973 ­Nobel literature prize and wrote a dozen novels,
including “The Living and the Dead” and “The Vivisector,” but
“Voss” is his greatest work.

3. Quarantine
By Jim Crace
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957

Judea. Two thousand years ago. A fat and lazy merchant, Musa, lies dying
in a tent, abandoned to “the devil’s fever.” Miri, his ­pregnant
wife, prays for her violent husband’s death. But while she’s away
digging his grave, a young pilgrim from Galilee arrives at their tent
and whispers a blessing to the dying Musa before beginning a 40-day fast
in a remote cave. When Miri returns, Musa has recovered. For the
Galilean is none other than Jesus of Nazareth. Jim Crace’s brilliant
and audacious re-creation of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness succeeds
primarily through incremental invention, lit by unexpected flares of
anarchic humor. He gives ­Jesus four pilgrim ­companions, misfits all,
rolling the dice at the possibility of rebirth through self-denial. Into
Musa’s materialistic mind Crace puts the idea of claiming ownership of
the land where the caves are found and ­charging rent for using them.
And for Jesus’ suffering the ­author contrives a resolution that is
shocking but also, for many readers, deeply satisfying.

4. Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living
By Carrie Tiffany
Scribner, 2006

In 1934, a “farming train” travels across the sparsely populated lands
of northern Australia, distributing aid to poor settlers in the form of
scientific data on animal feed, crop production and domestic skills. In
the train’s ­“sewing car” is a young woman, Jean, whose romantic
vision of the world makes her tragically susceptible to men’s desires.
Dragged off the train by an impetuous suitor, Roger Pettergree, a soil
expert, and married before she has time to imagine her own future, Jean
embarks with Pettergree on a long, doomed journey to establish a
scientifically managed model farm on land unfit to support it. In this
debut novel, Carrie Tiffany shows perfect pitch, creating a world in
which drought and vermin combine to snatch all rewards from human
endeavour and yet where Jean’s generosity of spirit imbues the meanest
artifact with ­transcendent beauty.

5. The Crossing
By Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 1994

Cormac McCarthy is ­America’s greatest contemporary poet of the wild.
His fictional journeys have strange beginnings and desolate endings,
confirming man’s smallness in a world where “God sits and conspires in
the destruction of what he has been at such pains to ­create,” as
McCarthy writes in “The Crossing.” Here, 16-year-old Billy ­Parham,
son of a rancher, rescues a she-wolf from a trap one winter’s morning
and decides to light out from home, dragging the wolf behind his horse
across the border into Mexico. Billy’s intention is to release the wolf
into the inaccessible mountains from which she strayed, but by crossing
a geographical and temporal border, he enters a world of anarchy and
violence. Piece by inevitable piece, he is stripped of everything that
gives his life ­sustenance and meaning. Billy’s ­courage in the face of
pain, loss, ­hunger and bereavement, no less than his unsentimental
understanding of the lives of animals, makes him a ­remarkable and
timeless hero. This heroism is, in its turn, heroically served by
McCarthy’s dark unraveling ­sentences that gather like storm clouds and
break in freakish thunder.
—Ms. Tremain’s novels include ­“Music and Silence” and “The
­Colour.” Her most recent work, “The Road Home,” has just been
released in paperback.