Swan Song

I read McCammon's "The Wolf's Hour" when I was a teenager and was amazed by the author's daring: who would have thought to combine werewolves with the spy genre? In the intervening years I forgot the name of the book as well as the author. When I finally remembered the author's name and discovered McCammon wrote a post-apocalyptic novel, I just had to pick it up.

I was not prepared for Swan Song. This review contains spoilers, so if you want to be as unprepared I was read no further.

Steeped in 1980s Cold War paranoia, Swan Song is an end-of-the-world parable about good and evil. There are multiple protagonists, including Sister the formerly crazy homeless woman, Swan the girl who can make plants grow, Josh the giant black wrestler, and a whole pile of supporting characters that are too numerous to list here. On the bad guy side we have Colonel Macklin, a former military officer holed up in a mountain fortress, Roland Croninger, a psychotic gamer and Friend, who might just be the Devil incarnate. There are occasional nods to mysticism, including a glass ring/crown, a magic mirror, a dowsing stick named Crybaby, and a bit of fortunetelling. Indeed, much of the book's plot involves tarot mysticism, a point I gradually lost track of throughout the book's nearly thousand pages.

It's a tribute to McCammon's writing that World War III is every bit as horrible as we fear. The sight of a bus hurled high into the air, flaming bodies falling out of it like burnt embers, stuck with me long after I finished the book. And the fear and hope of the survivors holed up in the mountain fortress as they watch the missiles pass overhead is palpable. His text often verges on the poetic, and McCammon's is careful to realistically portray the effects of radiation and conflict: shock, blisters, and bruises are a common occurrence. I never realized how rarely you hear about shock in fiction until I read Swan Song.

On the other hand, McCammon occasionally veers off into crazy mutant-land with two headed mountain lions, another doomsday device, and another mountain fortress. And that's where Swan Song breaks down a bit. Midway through the book, the plot advances by seven years. The purpose of the time shift seems primarily to move Swan's age forward so she can have a romantic interest, but it's a bit much to swallow--McCammon works so hard to make the world feel real, and then doesn't do enough to make it feel aged by seven years. Relationships seem frozen in time and characters rarely reference the intervening years.

Swan Song is also relentlessly grim: sodomy, rape, infanticide, patricide, matricide, disease, torture, suicide, drug use...it's all on ugly display here. After awhile, it gets so bad it's difficult to stick with the book. When McCammon skips forward in time, I had difficulty believing the characters survived in such a depressing land. But it does get better, eventually, and that's where the biggest problem lies...

There's no real climax between good and evil. The crown/ring of jewels that Sister spends her whole life protecting is hinted at being even more powerful in Swan's hands. And that's it. Friend, the shapeshifting demonic presence, is clearly constrained by limits of the flesh...until it's inconvenient to the plot.

After a thousand pages, you better believe I expect the book to culminate in a holy war. I'm glad McCammon finally gives his poor characters a break (the few he leaves alive, that is), but I'm less pleased by the failure to really settle things once and for all. It's like reading only the first two books of Lord of the Rings. I wanted closure, dammit!

Still, Swan Song is a triumph of writing and definitely worth reading. McCammon provides a tantalizing glimpse of a world that we all secretly know and fear. And he writes with the deft vision of a movie director, creating moments (a race to the death in a mall filled with psychopaths, a showdown with hungry wolves, the aforementioned nuclear war) that haunt your dreams long after you've finished Swan Song.