The Road

This book by Cormac McCarthy will (calling it, yup) go down in history as one of the best and most poignant novels to emerge from the United States of America - ever.*

   A non-specific apocalypse has ravaged everything. All plants and animals are dead, and human civilisation has collapsed, over several years descending into a horror beyond misery, where simply meeting other people can be life or death as you don't know if they'll kill you to take your stuff or rape and eat you. Against this backdrop, utterly bereft of hope and beauty and goodness, a father and his young son follow the road south to the coast, trying to scavenge food (anything but other humans) and survival supplies and avoid raiders and cannibals on the way.**

   The story is extremely simple - so the father/son relationship is given space to become the main character, with heartwrenchingly direct dialogue, illuminating the main theme of the book: that even when all else is seemingly lost, if we have others whom we can trust and love and be loved by, there is hope, and we can carry that fire within us to persist in facing the challenges that may arise in the hope of finding others who are holding onto the same hope and still believing in goodness, the human capacity for helping each other. The omnipresent threat of slow (starvation) and sudden (cannibal-thieves) death looms over this relationship founded on a hope that the boy has little experience of other than through assurance from the man that it exists; several brief encounters with kind people widen this, though several brief encounters with horrifically threatening people narrow it, and ultimately it is ambiguous (until the end but spoilers) whether the boy who has grown up in this bleak world genuinely grasps what the man has been trying to pass down.

   It is also exquisitely well-crafted - everything from description of surroundings to conversation to carefully-warily methodical actions evoke the sense of utter desolation, of a grandly poetic lack of anything grand or poetic, of a constant urgency and dread and fear and slow rasping unworldly decay. The world is as vividly drawn as it needs to be, the atmosphere hanging low and heavy everywhere so even simple details are pervaded with an imagined visualisation of things burned, twisted, broken, lost, dead and gone. McCarthy's construction of such a real-feeling world lends an immense tenderness to the central relationship; we are drawn into the lives and the man and the boy so as to be constantly enraptured by their devotion to each other and constantly terrified for their survival. They are living in a world without nature or civilisation, where the only life is human, and the only life that can be trusted to be good is each other.

   Ultimately it is a novel that shows us how much we have to lose, in a social-economic-ecological context, but reminds us alongside this of what we can never lose if only we are determined to hold onto it - and that is our own decision to try to be good. Even when surrounded by unimaginable hardship and evil. As the man teaches the boy, so the fire is passed onward. We persist.

   Anyway. It is incredible. Read it.

* Instant classic. Yes. The film adaptation of it is also by a pretty long margin the best post-apocalyptic movie (except Wall-E maybe) ever; the bleak visual style echoes the flavour of the book's prose brilliantly and Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee bring the man and the boy to life perfectly. But is it as good as the book? I'm not going to answer this as I hate this question.

** Reading or watching stories set in this kind of world, I am growingly aware that were such a civilisational breakdown to occur, I would struggle a great deal to survive. Our socioeconomic systems of convenience have not prepared me for such a life. My best hope would probably be hiding underground somewhere with loads of bottled water and tinned beans and stuff to read until it all blows over or everyone who might eat me is dead from mad cow disease or whatever you get from eating people... man, I need to start digging and stockpiling