Provisional
Truth | Book Reviews | November 2006
The Road
by
Cormac McCarthy, July 2006
  "A long shaft of light followed by a
series of low concussions" is the entire description of a
calamity that has befallen humankind. Cormac McCarthy's
post-apocalyptic saga offers little explanation as to what happened
or why, but rather follows a man and his young boy and their
efforts to survive in a resulting dead, ash-covered, cloud-darkened world.
The cause is left to the reader's
imagination: whether all-out nuclear war
(Armageddon?) or
perhaps a
massive asteroid impact, Earth has been subjected to the
ravages of nuclear winter, in which
chiefly from lack of sunlight virtually all plant, animal and marine life
eventually has perished, and the
remnant of humankind survives by scavenging preserved foods and
canned goods - and by cannibalism - for a few years with only fading hope
for some better future and dimming memories of an idyllic past to separate
them from the many who in despair took their own lives.
The unnamed man and his boy, about 6-8
years old, are trying to reach the southern seacoast in hopes of warmer
temperatures and (?) something better. They are traveling a road
of destruction and danger, past burnt cities and farms, pushing their few belongings in a
shopping cart, armed with a disintegrating roadmap and a pistol with
two bullets remaining.
The father has managed to keep them
alive the entire boy's life, alone, as his wife, pregnant with the
boy at the
time of the disaster, chooses to end
her life some years later rather than face her fear of a more gruesome end, raped,
killed and eaten at the hands of the marauding bands.
"We're the good guys," father repeatedly
tells son. "We carry the fire," of hope for survival, yet the
father's actions to frequently save their lives demonstrates his
inability to live that creed. They more represent a "neutral"
survivor mentality, neither evil nor good, neither helping nor
intentionally hurting those they encounter along the way.
Based on McCarthy's description of the
environment, it seems unlikely any humans ultimately will survive this
cataclysm, becoming only a question of "when" the last person
expires, as it would appear the miserable conditions are present
worldwide. Sooty, gritty black ash covers the landscape and
daytime is merely a dim, cloud-covered extension of the bitter cold
nights, and everywhere is death and despair:
"They began to come upon from time to
time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy
language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common
in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities,
hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of
food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The
world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in
front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of
blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the
rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of
food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The
soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling
along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early
and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches
trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently
as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and
died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun
and returned again as trackless and unremarked as the path of any
nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."
And yet the father tries to keep hope
alive within the frail, doubting son, who, never experiencing
anything other than these conditions, finds increasingly unlikely
the stories he hears of birds and grass and blue skies and warmth of
the sun.
They reach the coast but nothing
has improved, and hope, fragile and fleeting, fades with the
father's realization that his wife's solution some years before may
have been the better choice. If not for the boy, who represents
hope, good and a future not composed of their present miserable
existence, the father long ago would have joined his wife.
The Road offers the reader a
mesmerizing, chilling tale of survival and also a poignant reminder
that love, hope and faith - if only faith in one's own will to
survive - remain humankind's greatest capacities.
(For a discussion of the possibility of
an asteroid impact, see
Judgment Day - Apophis, God of Darkness and Chaos.)
What Others Are Saying About
The Road at
Amazon.com.
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