The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck

It’s been a very long time since I’ve read any John Steinbeck.

I don’t know if I’ve ever read East of Eden, but obviously The Grapes of Wrath and One Mice One Men both passed through my readerly paws a very long time ago, as did The Pearl (because it was a set text on my high school syllabus (or maybe even pre-high school syllabus) when I was at school ten thousand years ago (I am very (too) old)).

I mention this because I don’t remember those books well enough to be able to assert if The Moon Is Down is an archetypal John Steinbeck novel and he wasn’t always excellent or if this is – as it felt to me – a novel-by-numbers from a career novelist who basically couldn’t be arsed on this occasion…

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The Moon Is Down is set in a coastal community that is invaded by an occupying force.

Although no direct clarity is given within the text as to the nationalities of the two sides involved, the context of the time in which it is set (and the blurb of this PAN paperback edition) makes it very plain that the victim is Norway and the invading forces are only the bloody Nazis, who are here to extract coal and any other resources they can grasp with their grubby Hugo Boss-clad hands…

The action covers somewhere between 6 months and a year, with the occupying force arriving not quite bloodlessly but as close to that as they could get at the start, their smooth entry all thanks to a local business leader who had been a long term German plant sent over years earlier, who successfully undermined the local invasion preparedness.

The principal character that we meet in the first chapter, though, is the mayor of the town, who seeks to both avoid excess violence while also avoiding capitulation…

It is obvious that this is a position that cannot hold, and as months pass, the occupying force’s harsh military justice inflicted on any infraction against the smooth extraction and export of the locally mined coal makes the mayor’s position ever less tenable…

The novel ultimately bounces by chapter between a focus on the occupiers or on the occupied.

There is a youngish widow whose husband is executed very early into the occupation after he (semi-intentionally) kills one of the Germans. As an attractive single woman, she eventually becomes the target of the simultaneously pathetic and sinister advances of one of the German officers, who she stabs to death with scissors…

There is the traitorous business leader who I mentioned before who remains naively confused as to why everyone in the town now hates him and offended that the German officers don’t treat him like a respected peer…

There are the naive young German officers who thought the invasion would basically be a holiday, filled with fun shagging and fun shooting…

and there are the jaded senior staff who don’t quite believe in the efficacy of the blitzkrieg, still traumatised by the retreat from the trenches of the first World War…

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Is it a good novel?

Well, it’s a short novel, so that’s always something to be thankful for…

It mostly bounces between scenes set in the mayor’s house – where the German officers have billeted themselves – or in the house of the young widow, with any action (bombings, shootings, fights, executions, industrial sabotage and all that crap) being recounted by characters in dialogue, rather than described by the omniscient third person narrator.

This leads me to make the following conclusion: that The Moon Is Down was originally written as a play, with lines between the dialogue added at a later point.

Maybe, tho, this is the style of all Steinbeck? Maybe it’s not, tho…

I don’t know and I don’t care to do any research (this is a blog post not an essay).

Either way, this book feels like what it is – a not very famous late(ish) career novel[la] by a career novel[la]ist.

It speaks to a different structure for the career of a writer of fiction, compared to what we have now, as do the oeuvres of many other mid-century career novelists; someone like Steinbeck (and Gram Greene and Iris Murdoch and many countless others) basically published a novel every year, and as long as the word count was hit and it wasn’t so shit that it ended the career, anything was good enough…

The Moon Is Down isn’t a terrible novel, but it’s very clear that absolutely nobody would have considered this an important or a major work…

With most novelists writing literature today (i.e. I’m not including crime fiction or novelisations of computer games or whatever), one gets the impression that someone (at minimum the novelist, if not necessarily the publisher and/or critics) thanks every published novel might well be one of the best books ever written…

Unless you’re writing crap for morons (offence meant, “cosy crime” (if you read anything described like that have a long fucking look at yourself)), it’s no longer possible to just toss out a novel length book every 12 months and have enough money to have two houses and champagne bills… But that was the case 60 years ago. And here it shows.

It’s not a bad novel, not at all… it’s direct, brutal, human, emotive, emotional, serious and articulate …

But more than any book I’ve thought about in a while, it reminded me of how I felt reading Across the River and into The Trees a decade and a half ago, after having luxuriated through Hemingway’s (arguably) flawless big big hitters (one of which I more recently re-read and it fucking stood up).

The Moon Is Down doesn’t feel like a novel that mattered to anyone whether it existed or not. And, as someone who reads a lot (and doesn’t really do anything else except for all the other things I do), you can really tell.

It also reminded me of Graham Greene, in an unflattering way… Although I enjoy the work of that dead English writer, I think (with a couple of notable exceptions) there aren’t many books of his you could really say had any purpose other than to while away the empty hours in between breakfast and meeting someone else’s wife for sex.

I dunno, though…

What is literature for?

Expressing humanity?

Creating empathy?

Evoking character and meaning and thought?

Yeah, probably all those things, yeah.

So how can I say The Moon Is Down is not an excellent novel when it does all those things?

I don’t know.

That’s a good question.

If you’re looking for certainty, knowledge, consistency or anything else, you’re in the wrong place here at TriumphOfTheNow.com. I know nothing, except that so fucking old and so fucking miserable. Lol lol aha.

Ok gotta go hit a treadmill for an hour of premium television. See ya next time!!!