Cassie McCullough

Yeah.

But they're all just so consumed with pathos that, you know, they're not happy characters.

But just first, it's an amazing book.

It messes with structure so much that, like, you can't talk separately about characters.

You can't talk about characters without looking at the notion of time that the book establishes.

You know, you can't talk about setting without, I mean, everything is, it's all interwoven and fairly complex.

It's a bit of a masterwork, actually.

But yeah, I think particularly if you want to look at the central theme of the book, you've got to look at the Depression era stuff that's going on and the echoes of what's happening now.

And how everybody in the Depression believed that it was the end of the world.

You know, you had that dust bowl in America.

Not many people know about that, but everybody thought it was the end of the world.

Like all the topsoil was gone and the air was full of dust.

Yeah, and it was like, well, everything's gone.

There's no water.

There's no vegetation.

We're all going to die.

Yeah, and the economy's gone.

It's wrecked, ruined, destroyed.

It's never coming back.

You know, financial crisis and all this sort of thing, ecological crisis, and everyone thought they were finished.