The Road

A few days ago I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Road"(first published in 2006), but it has taken me a few days to really absorb it.

You'd think that with a cover like this, I would have at least a hint of the unnerving bleakness that was the theme of the book. But you'd be wrong.

The novel is set in a post-unnamed-cataclysm world, in which some catastrophe has led to the atmosphere being encased in a smoky cloud cover, effectively killing all the world's plant life (and, thereby, all the world's animal life). The few remaining humans are left to scrounge the earth for the remaining cans of food and other resources, such as fuel for fires (because, apparently, without the sun, it gets pretty cold during winter).

Through this dark world (pun intended), the reader follows a peripatetic man and his son, as they relentlessly follow a tattered map to the coast, where the man has hung his last best hope of finding any sort of civilization (although it is clear to the readers that this hope is completely unfounded in this fictional reality).

A story about a relatively silent man and boy walking around in a world without sunlight would be pretty boring. To add intrigue, then, McCarthy has them encounter various other survivors and horrific situations including a bit of cannibalism (because humans are the last source of meat on earth). This book is not for the faint of heart. McCarthy's prose is as stark and as brutal as the story described, but also hauntingly beautiful - as if the descriptions and metaphors used would be the type of literature a survivor would write.

The book itself is chilling in the way it portrays many of the darker sides of the way we live today, as well as presenting terrible choices that nobody hopes to ever make. In a dying world, would you be the type of person to keep surviving through the killing of others, or to kill yourself (which is what the man tells the boy to do if he were ever to be confronted by the cannibals), or to just keep moving on and clinging to baseless hopes? Would you rather wander the earth silently on your own to eventually die by yourself, or would you take a companion or join a group and risk their betrayal the next time the food runs short? After reading a scene in which the boy drinks what is perhaps the last soda in their molding world, I slowed down to savor my next Dr. Pepper and appreciated something I so often take for granted.

I am still puzzled by the novel's final passage, regarding the trout that once swam in the world's streams. The book ends with the line "In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed with mystery." It is the only point in the book which does not focus on the man or the boy (or, does it?), and I am not quite sure how I am supposed to feel about it. (Based on the rest of the novel, though, I doubt it's meant to make the reader feel bright and bubbly.)

I will not soon forget this book, its words, and the characters and world and images it presents. One passage in particular strikes me as one morbidly worth sharing and contemplating (although I don't know why):

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the interstate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (p 130)

Harsh sentiment, good writing.