Six Dollars and Sixty-Six Cents

In Greg Araki's stunning film The Doom Generation, that's the price of everything. Three teenagers meander an apocalyptic roadtrip, pursued by meaningless violence, pursuing non-conformity through sexual pleasure or sexual pleasure through non-conformity depending on how you look at it. As in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood the apocalypse is readable in signage and symbols; O'Connor's broken car drove down route 666, while Araki's teenagers stop off at gas stations to buy Doritos, nachos, hot-dogs. And everything costs $6.66.

As a very young child, I used to ask my parents nightly; 'Is today the last day?' 'Will tomorrow be the last day?' 'What will happen on the last day?'

Apparently (I don't remember any of this) I concluded – not unhappily – that on the last day, time would start flowing backwards. I think I was pretty pleased with this idea because I was confident this would mean the eventual return of dinosaurs.

Then when I was about 11 someone told me that the ancient Mayan calendar ended in 2012, the logical conclusion being that time would also end there. Dear Quentin, I sympathise thoroughly with your fears about the end of the world, I even wrote a song about it once, I'm sorry for leaving that book lying around.

2012, then; significant because 2 + 0 + 1 + 2 equals 5, always a spiritually potent number, as well as being 2 & 3 (23), which should set alarm bells ringing, plus if you rearrange the 2s just slightly it spells Zion, right? So when it comes to making New Year's resolutions, be careful. I've just made mine and it shot me right in the foot...

See, the torment of working in a bookshop (which I have been doing for the last two months) (which incidentally is where I'm writing from, as not that many people are buying books on New Year's Eve) is learning to love certain editions, certain imprints. The Everyman Library, for example, is just amazing, I'm always jealous of anyone buying one of their editions. So I figured this year I'd aim to read every one of their 100 Essential Reads, in their edition where possible. And yeah, it turns out I've read 34 of them already. Which leaves... Good God! 66.

After the End: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Bk 1

The end-of-the-world narrative has many forms and many meanings. But, like its cousin the Dystopian or Utopian novel, it is always charged with a message about the world that the writer and reader share, the world that is ending or has ended. Sometimes, like a dystopia, it carries a warning about an aspect of our world that may prove to be destructive; other times, it reminds us of what is at the essence of who we are.

All ; Ovid, Metamorphoses Book 1, trans. Arthur Golding ; Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker ; Cormac McCarthy, The Road ; Max Brooks, World War Z and The Ultimate Zombie Survival Guide ; John Wyndham, The Day of The Triffids ; Mary Shelley, The Last Man ; Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End ; Margaret Atwood, Oryx & Crake and The Year of the Flood ; St John the Divine, The Revelation ; Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

1. Ovid – Metamorphoses, Book 1 (translated by Arthur Golding, 1567)

Without wanting to make sweeping statements about the context or purpose of Ovid’s fifteen book poem, the Metamorphoses, I would say that its great achievement is its use of collage: its ability to link different ideas and images with an immediacy that allows them to retain their individual power. Jumping from story to story, the narrative puts the various myths of gods and heroes and nymphs into an ordered sequence while at the same time celebrating their chaotic instability. Golding’s translation, informed by his own Calvinism and the religious and social instabilities of his time, gives this contrast an urgency that is both spiritual and political.

In the first book, a world created out of chaos begins with a Golden Age of implicit order. But the world declines; soon order must be enforced in the face of hardship. Finally, the world descends into the Age of Iron, a time of uncertainty and cruelty:

Of iron is the last,
In no part good and tractable as former ages past.
For when that of this wicked age once opened was the vein,
Therein all mischief rushèd forth. Then faith and truth were fain...
(Lines 143-146)

Jove, the king of the gods, calls ‘a Court of Parliament’ of gods together (191), who resolve that they will have to destroy the world and start afresh. At first, Jove wants to use his lightning bolts to destroy the Earth, but stops for fear that ‘the flames perhaps so high should grow / As for to set heaven on fire and burn up all the sky’ (300). Instead, Jove floods the world until

No difference was between the sea and ground,
For all was sea.
(343-344)

The images of the drowning world are playful – a mutation and transformation of the world, rather than a process of destruction: a wolf swims in a field of swimming sheep, dolphins play in the trees, anchors are buried in green fields. And all is not lost – a good man and a good woman, Deucalion and Pyrrha, survive the flood. Throwing stones behind their shoulders, the couple observe a miracle: the stones turn into a new race of humans, as perfect as marble sculptures, and ‘of these are we’ – humanity as we now know it – ‘the crooked imps and stony race’ (493).

Here, the apocalypse serves to remind humanity that they are creatures of divine creation. The fact of their creation is what gives them their strength; when this fact is forgotten, when humans forget their spiritual debt to the universe, they descend from the beauty of gold into the hardness of iron and have to start again.