The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

​Some years ago, my wife and I travelled to Kos to attend a friend’s wedding. It was the start of a new life for her and her partner. Our hotel was lovely, with plentiful food choices in the restaurant and a private swimming pool to laze around afterwards. The wedding took place on the nearby beach with red rose petals leading the bride and groom towards the promise of a good life together.

I was thinking of this idyllic scene during the recent, unseasonably warm weather as I gathered up my copy of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and challenged the sunshine to stop me in my tracks. It didn’t but the writing did. From the ravaged dustbowl of Oklahoma through to the less natural ravages of humankind in California, I joined the Joad family on their journey towards a promised land.

Forced off the land and packing what few possessions they still had onto their rickety truck, three generations of the same family leave everything they have ever known to head west. They have withstood immense hardship just to arrive at this point in time, but now all of the elements have conspired to move them on, to move them out.

Set in the Depression of 1930s America, there is also a higher narrative, regularly appearing between chapters of toil, struggle, and death. That narrative tells us that this is not just about one family, but of communities who had the misfortune to live in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only route available to them is away from their homes; to leave their former lives behind.

The family faces physical and mental obstacles, helped only by fellow refugees who not only understand their shared plight but share enough to try to help each other as best they can. Family members drift away, surely never to be seen again, and others die en route. Pa is worn out, as is his position as head of the family. Ma assumes a dignified defiance, but only the youthful energy of brothers Al and Tom (who has served time in jail and is literally on the run) sustains the family.

Arriving at last in California, following their dream of finding work, a house, a school for the young ones; maybe even a piece of land, the family moves from one camp for the homeless – including Hoovervilles – to another, while seeking to work for their living and only earning enough to barely survive each day.

Hope arrives in one such community that runs its own affairs, and sets its own rules for the good of all. Obviously, this attracts suspicion and contempt from the authorities who were happy with things just as they were before, and have no intention of handing over their long-established structures and hierarchies to outsiders.

Long-standing residents of the state and the authorities seeking to protect ‘law and order’ are frightened by the influx of starving, increasingly angry people, knowing as they do that the ‘Okies’ have been duped: there will never be enough work to go around and what they have, they need to hold on to. Fear and self-preservation are the determinants here and no state or federal government is going to lift a finger to challenge those drivers, rather support them to unsettle their fellow men, less fortunate than they are, by ensuring that the dream is, in reality, seen as the nightmare it actually is. You’re more likely to wake up in a hostile, unwelcoming land so better to die horribly in the places you’ve left behind rather than attempt such fruitless, hopeless escapes from them.

The Joads retain their humility and their resolve – even offering the milk of human kindness to starving strangers as the book concludes, inconclusively, now with the experienced truth of not just nature’s unpredictable hostility but man’s inhumanity to man.

Those who profess to be religious have tried to turn this Pulitzer Prize-winning epic into some kind of modern-day ‘Exodus.’ This is not a story of liberation though. Surely being shackled to a plough in the most inhospitable weather is preferable to being shackled to hopelessness amidst your inhospitable fellow men.

Lauded by many as a classic and cited as a key reason for Steinbeck going on to win the Nobel Prize for literature, there was also derision at the time about him portraying communist principles in terms of self-determination through collective support, especially in working practices.

I simply loved it. The writing is beautiful, especially the descriptions of nature in its purest forms. Yes, the language can be tricky at times and, yes, sometimes I did feel that points were drawn out a bit to be emphasized, but I am so pleased I finally got to read it and recommend it to all.

When I’d finished, I also remembered the refugees from Syria who were camped along the coast from that wedding in Kos, carefully hidden away by the Greek authorities who warned us not to engage with them as it would just ‘encourage’ them. The important people continue to tell us that we need to stop the small boats; stop the little people who never chose to move for the promise of something better in the first place, but rather because they had nowhere else to go. 

John Steinbeck has been called "a giant of American letters” but his social observations were not the stuff of myth; they were real, are real.

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