Well, I finally read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (2006). I wanted to wait to read it til the flowers were in bloom, the trees were green and the weather warm again, so that it wouldn’t bring me down too much. It was comforting to see that world out the window, while reading about an earth that is a giant cinder inhabited by cannibals.
The premise is that there has been a sudden cataclysm, probably a full-scale nuclear war, maybe collision with an asteroid or six. The earth is in some kind of permanent nuclear winter, smoke and ash blotting out the sun, constant rain and snow, all the trees and vegetation dead. But McCarthy never tells us why, and we never know for sure. As a result, you can apply this particular parable to any event that threatens to thoroughly disrupt “life as we know it” for everyone everywhere — like the climate crisis, for instance. That crisis probably won’t produce a world-destroying conflagration, but it’s already produced some pretty big ones. And while people may not resort to cannibalism, climate chaos already has destroyed the food supply for tens of millions in this last year alone. The actually-occurring dystopia 100 years from now may look a lot like The Road, only with nothing blotting out the sun. The real interest of the book, of course, is in the relationship of father and child. The world is over, and it’s only a matter of time for the people; the sixth mass extinction has happened, with a vengeance. “What are we doing?” the boy starts to ask. That is another way of asking, Why live? As the book goes on, we see that it’s the love between the two main characters that keep them going: neither can bear to see the other die, and neither will leave the other. So both keep on keeping on. The real question is whether they can continue to be “the good guys” who are “carrying the fire,” whether they can prove that humans can continue being humans at the end of humanity, scrounging for the remnants of food that are left without turning cannibal. McCarthy keeps that question front and center, by writing the most granular descriptions of what it takes to survive in a world where both the elements and the others are hostile (want to know how to keep a shopping cart rolling for hundreds of miles? or how to keep shotgun shells from sliding out of your bandolier? or how to improvise foot-coverings when shoes are unavailable? This is the book for you). It’s the least glamorous, most detailed, most squalid post-apocalypse you can imagine. The father, whose sole “mission” is to protect the boy, is willing to kill anyone who threatens his survival. The boy, for his part, can’t bear to ignore a fellow person in distress: he’s too empathetic for this world. The man risks becoming callous and mean. The boy risks getting them both killed. It’s a great team. Because it’s Cormac McCarthy, the narrative prose gets purplish at times. And the ending is a bit maudlin. But the dialogue is terse and compelling, and the world-building very, very believable. It made me appreciate the greenery and blooms while we have them.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |