Last week I read Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which entailed total global annihilation. This week my subject is Cormack McCarthy’s, The Road, which tells a tale of survival in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. These may seem to have a vaguely similar subject matter, but the tone of each of these novels could not be further apart.
Honestly, I did not intend to make the end of the world a theme in consecutive weeks, but when a friend told me about this book, I could not help but to read it.
The Road tells the story of a man and his son struggling to survive in bleak badlands years after a global catastrophe filled the sky with ash, rendered all modern technologies obsolete, and wiped out most wildlife completely. The protagonists head southward down a desolate road in order to evade the impending winter that is almost certain to bring death along with it.
The only effects the man and his boy have in their possession is a rickety shopping cart filled with limited supplies (a few toys for the boy, a couple tarps, etc.) and some dregs of food along with a revolver containing only two rounds in it’s chambers. They leave the road in order to rummage through abandoned houses and shops with hopes to find any scraps of food, a few handy tools, or some fuel to assist them in building a campfire.
Like the lead characters, most of the other inhabitants of the desterted planet are in a constant state of paranoia and spend much of their time in hiding from droves of merciless men that have banded together, doing absolutely unforgiveable acts of violence to all those they encounter. In addition to these “bad guys” (as the boy refers to them), the man and his son encounter other survivors, most of whom employ a ruthless free-for-all attitude.
Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.
With nobody else in existence that can be trusted, the boy and his father have no other choice but to rely completely on each other and do everything in their power to ensure the other’s survival.
McCarthy uses several different techniques to create a completely godforsaken landscape. The text is steeped with descriptive devises that clearly paint the bleak picture of this post apocalyptic world and peppers in some of the characters thoughts and nightmares as a way to delve deep into their psyche. If an unexpected cataclysm wiped out most of the planets life, leaving only a handful of desperate survivors, I would expect this novel to be a very accurate portrayal of the trials and tribulations associated with such devastation (hopefully that day will never come).
As you may now see, this is not an uplifting story, but it is far more intriguing than it is depressing. I recommend this book to anyone. It is next to impossible to put down once you begin and can easily be read in a night. If a few hours of reading is still too much, don’t worry, the film adaptation is set to be released in October. If the movie is half as good as the book, it is sure to generate some buzz around Oscar season (Cormac McCarthy also authored the academy award winner “No Country For Old Men”).
