Cormac McCarthy, "The Road": Now, Tomorrow, and For Ever More

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.

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.

Margaret Atwood's "The Year of the Flood": You'll Hear that Final Whimper...

The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

With the exception of limericks about Nantucket and perhaps Poe’s “The Raven,” there may be no bit of poetry more familiar to those who received an education in the USA during the mid-twentieth century than the final stanza of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Say it with me: “This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.”

A flourishing sub-genre of fiction is entirely devoted to predicting whether Eliot was right – it could be a bang, after all – and to just how that inimitable whimper might come to pass. Though the method of civilization’s passing might be secondary to the plight of the scattered survivors, the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction still must address the instrument of our demise – hence Eliot’s verbal musings. On the “bang” end of the spectrum authors have postulated rogue comets and mindlessly diabolical asteroids; alien invasion; or nuclear holocaust (e.g., Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon) – sometimes with but the barest of hints (c.f. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) about the events. The “whimper” contingent leans more toward environmental upheaval, plague (Stephen King’s The Stand), or both. And then there’s Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, in which a thoughtful author predicts that the proximal cause of mankind’s unhappy fate will be his own unrelenting hubris. For The Year of the Flood, Atwood reprises her dystopic vision of mankind’s future; this time as seen through the eyes of a handful of survivors – survivors of “the waterless flood.”
Toby survived the waterless flood partially because she’d prepared for such an eventuality – building a hidden store of provisions and medicinal herbs – and partially because the schoolmarmish, fifty-something herbalist had the good luck to be living in a secure high-end health spa. Ren survived by accident: when the plague hit, she’d been quarantined after possible contamination by one of her “clients” at the high-end sex club where she worked a trapeze act. This is their story…

Toby and Ren have shared history, believe it or not. They’d spent several years together as members of God’s Gardeners, a sect that seems to have been created by mating the Amish with PETA – the central tenets of the faith are to avoid the use of modern conveniences and to never eat anything with a face or a mother. The Gardeners celebrate a different saint each day, saints like Dian Fossey, Euell Gibbons, and Terry Fox; and live simple lives amid beehives and rooftop gardens. All the while, “modern civilization” swirls around their little colony – a dystopian hell in which gargantuan corporations have taken over even the last vestiges of government, and therefore may comport themselves pretty much as they please. When the only police or military agency on the planet is CorpSeCorps – the corporate security corps – the question of “who’s minding the minders” pretty much becomes moot. Meanwhile, the Corporations sequester their scientists and technicians in secure compounds where they gleefully develop “new and improved” product after “newer and more improved” product to peddle to the rest of humanity, those called the “plebes.” Filled with the bored, the uneducated, and the chronically unemployed; the plebelands are a sea of hedonism and violence upon which the scattered islands of the compounds float uneasily. The billions of plebes subsist on a diet of SecretBurgers (the secret is where the meat comes from), get their health care from HelthWyzer, get their rocks off at Scales & Tails (Ren’s employer, a division of SecksCorp), and the women dream of a spa weekend at ANooYoo (where Toby’s a manager). Obviously, the txtg gnrshn named the businesses.

And then one day the world changed: a particularly pesky new bug got loose and the corporations couldn’t manage to get it under control. And when the dust cleared, the only survivors were the few who’d been isolated when the plague struck – a surprising number of them Gardeners… The Year of the Flood tells the same story as many another post-apocalyptic novel: a small band of survivors struggles to find food and shelter, and fights off the criminals who flourish with the disappearance of social order. Where Atwood’s saga differs is in the construction of her plot: instead of a sharp break when “the flood” occurs, Atwood’s content to let her story wander back and forth across that line in flashbacks of varying lengths – mostly how Ren and Toby got to this point; less of how the planet got in such a state. As in her seminal novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood spends little effort on answering procedural questions – the “how” and the “why” are explained in just a few toss-off sentences. She is instead content to let her audience read between the lines of a 400-plus page social commentary – which makes it no less biting, when all is said and done.

The “universe” of The Year of the Flood is the same as that of Oryx and Crake, right down to the appearance of a handful of characters in both tales – The Snowman, narrator of Oryx and Crake, shows up as a teenaged Jimmy; Crake slips into the plot several times as Glenn; and Oryx even shows up once – as do the Crakers, the post-modern humanoids Crake designed and gave to Oryx to “train.” Though they share the same universe, however, with its manmade piggoons, rakunks, liobams, multicolored Mo’Hairs, and phosphorescent lumiroses; The Year of the Flood stands resolutely alone.

A superb example of Margaret Atwood’s renowned ability to spin a tale that both entertains and enlightens, The Year of the Flood is one of those rare books that can take its reader through the full range of emotions. By turns dryly witty, terrifying, thought-provoking, and heart-warming; Atwood’s latest is one you simply shouldn’t miss. As you're reading, you can hear that whimper...

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