The Road by Cormac McCarthy
In some not so distant future the unnamed man and boy shamble slowly across a bleak, ashen landscape, headed toward the shore of an unnamed sea. They are two of the last survivors, a pair of dying souls making slow progress across the face of a world already dead. They're following The Road down its winding path, passing desiccated village, burnt-out city, and dilapidated farmstead. The leaden sky is empty of birds; the cold, mucky gray water supports no fish; no animals prowl among the blackened stumps of the forest alongside their route. The few humans still alive forage for scraps of preserved food among the ruins or, worse, commit that unthinkable act so familiar to the last survivors of disaster.
In some other, brighter time, the man had had a wife, a home, a career. Now he has but a pistol with two bullets, a shopping cart, a few tattered blankets, and a plastic tarp to keep the ever-falling ashen snow from soaking through their few meager supplies. The boy, a child of indeterminate age, was born as the cataclysm that destroyed their world struck; his mother is long gone, dead by her own hand after uttering her own epitaph: "We're the walking dead in a horror film."
In this post-apocalyptic world there is no color left; only black, white, and an all-encompassing gray. There's little left for a father to teach his son: there will be no more games of catch, no more pop-up storybooks, no more hours whiled away on fishing trips. All that remains is survival, and the boy's grim, oft-repeated question: "We're the good guys, right?"
Maybe.
McCarthy's prose is beyond spare in The Road: his words have been stripped to bare essentials, their spare form a conscious parallel to the starvation diet upon which his characters subsist. Like the blighted world in which it's set, the book itself is nearly depopulated. The few characters are reduced to mere skeletal remnants in more than merely the physical sense; their sole surviving emotions a guttering orange flame of will to live and the white hot light of fear. For father and son alone, there is one other emotion: filial love; the pair's only constant in a forgotten and forgettable world. The power of that bond between father and son will overcome fear; overcome sorrow – it is what makes them the good guys.
McCarthy's bleak vision may serve as a prediction; it may serve as a warning. It will most certainly serve to incite contemplation.
In some other, brighter time, the man had had a wife, a home, a career. Now he has but a pistol with two bullets, a shopping cart, a few tattered blankets, and a plastic tarp to keep the ever-falling ashen snow from soaking through their few meager supplies. The boy, a child of indeterminate age, was born as the cataclysm that destroyed their world struck; his mother is long gone, dead by her own hand after uttering her own epitaph: "We're the walking dead in a horror film."
In this post-apocalyptic world there is no color left; only black, white, and an all-encompassing gray. There's little left for a father to teach his son: there will be no more games of catch, no more pop-up storybooks, no more hours whiled away on fishing trips. All that remains is survival, and the boy's grim, oft-repeated question: "We're the good guys, right?"
Maybe.
| From the pen of Cormac McCarthy (the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men) and soon to appear in theaters, The Road set a new standard for the author's often grim worldview. In his chilling saga of life amidst the ruins of our civilization, McCarthy has envisioned a future so bleak, so dismal, that to have given his characters names would have endowed them with too much humanity to bear. Instead, a nameless pair treks slowly through a blasted, ashen future world, their dragging steps lit sporadically by lightning flashes by night and rare glimpses of a wan sun behind billowing clouds of ash by day. "The nights now only slightly less black, by day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." |
McCarthy's prose is beyond spare in The Road: his words have been stripped to bare essentials, their spare form a conscious parallel to the starvation diet upon which his characters subsist. Like the blighted world in which it's set, the book itself is nearly depopulated. The few characters are reduced to mere skeletal remnants in more than merely the physical sense; their sole surviving emotions a guttering orange flame of will to live and the white hot light of fear. For father and son alone, there is one other emotion: filial love; the pair's only constant in a forgotten and forgettable world. The power of that bond between father and son will overcome fear; overcome sorrow – it is what makes them the good guys.
McCarthy's bleak vision may serve as a prediction; it may serve as a warning. It will most certainly serve to incite contemplation.
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