THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy
I’ve not read anything quite like this book by Cormac McCarthy. It won a Pulitzer Prize and was featured in Oprah’s Book Club. I’m a bit late catching up on the latest buzz and maybe most folks have already read it.
Global warming would be a picnic at the beach compared to a nuclear winter. In the book, a man and his young son push a shopping cart full of stuff down a road, camp and scavenge for food in a dying world following some global calamity. Nuclear war is never mentioned, but that or a big asteroid collision seem the only plausible causes of the environmental disaster they face.
All the vegetation is dead. Nothing grows. Agriculture is finished. Ash and soot chokes the atmosphere. The rivers and creeks are gray with ash and soot. There’s no clear sky or sun. The day is dim and covered by thick overcast. It’s cold, rainy, and it snows often. They’re cold and near starving all the time. There are a few other survivors, but most of them are trouble. The man and the boy are always hiding from cannibals – bad people, who’ve resorted to taking prisoners to be used as slaves or livestock to be eaten.
They’re on the move all the time, trying to get south, to the sea. The boy and his son are the good guys, “carrying the fire,” the all but lost hope of human decency that civilizations are built on.
There’s tension between the father, who’s scared and suspicious of everyone (for good reason), and the boy, who needs to believe there must be other “good guys” and yearns for community. The story’s heart-wrenching on a number of levels. I found myself “stealing” minutes to get back to the book and find out how the kid and his old man were doing.
Probably, the most disturbing thing about the book is its plausibility. There’s nothing outlandish, no creatures from outer space, no futuristic exotic technology. In this world of ours here today, a few loose nukes going off and some more shot off in panicked retaliation, and we’re on The Road like the one by Cormac McCarthy.
