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The Grapes of Wrath is the kind of book that pulls you in and refuses to let go.

There’s just something completely gripping about the way the narrative begins and the way each sentence is put together, it pulls and pulls with its expertly rendered descriptions that do wonders at capturing a landscape and a people undergoing great change. I didn’t want to stop reading, but I also took the time to savour each chapter because I knew that I could only read this for the first time once. So, I stretched it out, I made it last longer than I wanted to, and for me this is one of the surest signs that I was reading a truly great novel.

There’s so much to talk about here. There’s so much brilliance to discuss and so many themes, characters and motifs that warrant reflection. But I want to keep it simple. I want to talk about the things I liked most about the writing. Firstly, I like the naturalness of it. I like the way Steinbeck’s words felt authentic and real. Now let me explain, he does wonders at capturing the essence of time and the ever-changing nature of it. And he is also remarkably talented when it comes to capturing the bigger picture.

It would be easy to talk about the plot here and what pushes the story forward, though that is just half of the power the writing possesses. Steinbeck interposes his narrative with chapters that capture the heart of a nation: they capture the essence of America and the great American dream. They help to weave together a sense of collective consciousness that establish exactly what the characters are feeling against the backdrop of the Great Depression. He is setting the scene in a way that creates a sense of what the characters and people of this time were experiencing on a large scale. And its intoxicating. It’s a storytelling device that brought the novel to life in an incandescent way.

Aside from this, reading The Grapes of Wrath from an ecocritical perspective is quite rewarding. Above all it is a novel of migration, of discovering new landscapes after mass crop death: it is a novel of changing environments and changing circumstances. It’s also about ecology, about man’s ability to continuously affect his environment in largely detrimental ways. And because of this there is a stress on social community, on working together and learning to coexist and fit into the ecosystem and society at large.

Consider me thoroughly and completely impressed. Now I knew how great Steinbeck was from reading Of Mice and Men but I never really liked the sound of any of his other novels enough to pick one up. They just didn’t sound very interesting to me, but this appeared on a list of eco-fiction reads so I was quite curious to see how it fit the genre. And it seems to me this (important) aspect of the novel is a little overlooked, though (admittedly) there are many other significant themes to consider that do dominate the narrative and take centre stage.

More Steinbeck for me in the future!
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