Swan Song by Robert McCammon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
NOTE: This review contains spoilers. If you are spoiler-averse, skip this review. If you want a short take, here it is: there are better post-apocalypse books out there.
I bought the paperback of Swan Song when it first came out in 1987 after reading and enjoying McCammon’s science fiction/horror romp Stinger. For some reason I never got around to reading Swan Song, but nearly three decades later I finally got the ebook and jumped in. Unlike 1987 I did so with more trepidation, as I’d recently read McCammon’s short story collection Blue World, which I found rather uneven.
Swan Song is like a cartoon version of a post-apocalypse world. Or maybe it’s more a fantasy dreamed up by a high school kid extended to epic length. Either way, the book has most of the right ingredients but doesn’t know how to combine them effectively.
Set in the present day (at the time the mid-80s), Swan Song begins with political tensions ramping up and then someone–it’s purposely obfuscated who–starts launching nuclear attacks, and before you can say drop, roll and cover, the entire world has been blasted by nukes and the survivors are faced with years of nuclear winter.
As with most epic tales, the story chronicles different groups of survivors who ultimately converge and confront each other, to determine if good or evil will triumph. The characters range from pro wrestlers to ex-military, to religious fanatics and ex-military haunted by the ghosts of war. So far so good, yes?
Yes, more or less. The first part of the story chronicles the immediate aftermath of the nuclear attacks, with survivors scrabbling through destroyed cities, collapsed shelters and hellish landscapes filled with destruction and littered with corpses. This is all in service of laying the groundwork for the rest of the story, which jumps ahead seven years and picks up on all the characters’ lives as they slowly begin to converge for the final battle.
But before that seven year jump happens, the reader is tipped off to the sledgehammer subtlety to come. As the missiles fly at the novel’s beginning, the president is on a plane flying high above the nukes. As he tries to activate launch codes from a briefcase, the fiery apocalypse below spits up a bus filled with corpses that disables the plane and causes it to crash. This is Emmerich-level disaster here, presented straight-faced and without irony. The president later shows up as a crazy hermit who wants to destroy the world.
The premise of Swan Song is broadly similar to The Stand, perhaps the best-known post-apocalypse novel, and while there are similarities–a devastated world, supernatural elements, the meeting of good and evil to determine the future of the world–King focuses on the struggle to rebuild civilization while McCammon depicts a world where people turn savage and fight relentlessly and without remorse. Swan Song is filled with long, vividly-detailed battle scenes. There are a lot of really nasty people here–usually also insane because that’s what nukes do to you, I guess–and it’s all relentlessly grim.
I’m not saying this is a bad approach. In fact, it could have been compelling, but the problem is McCammon’s writing is so clunky. I keep trying to think of a better way to describe it, but that’s the word I keep coming back to. A lot of the prose here is fine, if unremarkable. McCammon keeps things moving, even if the story feels too long, but so much of the execution comes off as, well, clunky.
Here’s an example featuring the ex-military man, Colonel James Macklin, as he heads back into his Airstream trailer, which serves as the command post for the budding army he’s assembling:
He turned back toward the trailer. Sheila Fontana was standing in the doorway, and suddenly Macklin realized that all this excitement had given him an erection. It was a good erection, too. It promised to stay around awhile. He walked up the carved staircase with its banister of demon faces, entered the trailer and shut the door.
This is just bad. No one should ever use the phrase “it was a good erection” outside a clinical test report or soft porn. Mercifully, McCammon declines to depict the actual sex acts. The banister of demon faces is made by a crazy person, by the way. Did I mention there are a lot of crazy people in Swan Song?
Oh, and the military force that Macklin is assembling is called the Army of Excellence. Yes. Maybe Army of Total Awesomeness was already taken.
The titular character of Swan, who has the ability to rekindle life in plants and trees, rejects the advances of a potential paramour:
All she could think to say was, “Don’t bother me again!” Instantly she felt a pang of pain that sliced her open from head to toe.
That is one serious pang of pain. Fortunately she magically stitches back together so the story can continue.
One last example, which is something that regularly pulled me out of the story. Analogies are dangerous things. I try to avoid them because they are almost always terrible and best used if played for laughs.
For a few seconds bullets had been whizzing past as thick as flies at a garbage men’s convention.
This is terrible writing. It doesn’t even make sense as an analogy. In a way I can’t really blame McCammon. An editor should have cut this. Given the length of the book, maybe the editor didn’t cut anything.
Another big issue with the story is the depiction of the big bad guy, given various names and identities throughout, such as Friend. Yes, when asked his name in one of the final scenes, he says, “You can call me Friend” and that is literally how he is referred to for the rest of the book by the author. Friend. Friend is not very friendly, and has a few spooky tricks up his sleeve. He can change his appearance, molding his face to look like others, or sometimes he just gets all silly and puts on a face full of mouths if the mood strikes him. He also changes the color of his eyes a lot, for no apparent reason. Maybe it’s a nervous tic. He sends out fly-like things from his mouth that act as drones, allowing him to spy on others. He can make his hands catch on fire.
With this bag of tricks he should be fairly intimidating, but his character comes off as flat and without menace, even as he goes about doing Bad Guy things. Why? Because McCammon, perhaps in trying to be coy and not come right out and say he’s THE DEVIL, instead creates a character who acts like a temperamental teen, who wants to bring about the end of humanity, but never offers a compelling reason for this (other than his juvenile cries of “It’s my party!”) and at the end of the story he just kind of goes away. Maybe there was going to be a sequel? Maybe something did get cut? He’s a one-dimensional villain who doesn’t really do anything. It’s actually kind of baffling. Maybe McCammon was saying the real bad guys are us. His depiction of most humans post-apocalypse is not exactly flattering, after all.
I wanted to like Swan Song, but the writing and many of the characterizations left me underwhelmed. I’d rate this one as a major disappointment.
