Geezer Lit
The Return of the Older Hero, Part Deux Not the Same Old Guy
The return of the older hero
THIS FALL, a movie arrives that I’ve been looking forward to eagerly, entirely because of the book on which it is based. The book, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson was published in Sweden in 2009 and has since sold more than six million copies worldwide. The story chronicles the adventures of one Allan Karlsson, who, on the day of his 100th birthday, sneaks out of a retirement home in the town of Malmkoping, Sweden, and buys a bus ticket to the first town that the change in his pocket will take him to, accompanied by a wheeled suitcase belonging to a young man who was rude to him in the bus station. The suitcase turns out to contain 37.5 million Swedish kronor – just under $6 million Canadian – of drug money, and the adventure is on.
The Amazon entry for the book describes Allan Karlsson as “much like Forrest Gump (if Gump were an explosives expert with a fondness for vodka).” I agree, to a point. I think the book is quirky, deadpan hilarious, weirdly liberating, but also something else: revolutionary. Jonasson has succeeded in taking a time-tested archetype of the elderly hero – the elderly hero who departs on a quest – and turning it on its head.
The “Geezer-on-the-Lam” genre is a venerable one, one you’ll probably recognize: an aging protagonist suffers a crisis and sets out on a journey to escape it; on the road, he (or she) has a revelation and is dramatically transformed by realizing a truth previously hidden by a character flaw. The transformation is nonnegotiable. Peace and acceptance follow – after which the old hero usually dies.
A nearly example of the genre might be its most famous: Shakespeare’s King Lear. Written around the year 1605, the play tells the story of Lear, an English monarch who decides to retire from the throne and divide his kingdom among his three daughters. To determine to whom he’ll give the largest portion, he asks each daughter to tell him how much they love him. His two older daughters, Goneril and Reagan, tell him they love him beyond anyone or anything; but Cordelia, his youngest and favourite, says she can’t put into words how she feels about him. “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.” Furious, he disinherits her and cedes the realm to Goneril and Reagan, with whom he then goes to stay, one after the other, in a kind of trial run at senior relocation. When it becomes apparent that the two are inhospitable vipers, he sets off on a confused, hallucinatory trek across the moors, alone except for his fool. He only comes to his senses when he’s reunited with Cordelia, who he finally realizes is his only truly loving, honest daughter. But it’s too late: Cordelia is murdered, and Lear dies, the victim of his pride. “Geezer-on-the-Lam” tragedy-style.
At almost exactly the same time as Shakespeare was finishing King Lear in England, Miguel de Cervantes in Spain, was putting the final touches on his masterpiece, Don Quixote, a kind of King Lear as if reimagined by the film-making Coen brothers. Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman living in the town of La Mancha, is so obsessed with the idea of reviving Chivalry that he dubs himself Don Quixote de la Mancha and sets out on a quest for knightly glory. On the road, Quixote fights giants (actually, windmills), frees a lady being kidnapped by enchanters (actually, monks accompanying her) and makes his servant, Sancho Panza, the governor of an imaginary isle. When he finally comes to his senses, he realizes that the chivalric dream has poisoned his mind, and knighthood is no job for a sensible Spanish boy. Then he dies. “Geezer-on-the-Lam” comedy-style.
Over the centuries, the genre keeps popping up. In the 1843 Charles Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is an ancient miser with a stony heart, who has a Christmas Eve journey inflicted upon him by a trio of ghosts, Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. In a series of flyover montages, they show him what his life has been and what it will be if he doesn’t mend his ways, which, of course, he does (so he doesn’t die). A hundred years later, in Arthur Miller’s 1949 classic, Death of a Salesman, we get Willy Loman, an aging, struggling pedlar of sorts who gets fired by a man half his age and is launched on his own befuddled wanderings through his Brooklyn neighbourhood, tending the flowers, seeing people who are dead, before finally coming to realize that he’s been living in a fantasy world of his own, where sales figures are the measure of a man and that the only truly important thing is the love of