Monday 16 October, 2006

The Road

I read Cormac McCarthy's, The Road, this weekend. It's futuristic fiction meets the western meets something else all together: a vision of the power of love in a world so nightmarish you wonder if love's capacity to keep people going is a curse. Here's a review from The Washington Post. That review proposes that McCarthy's also drawn from the horror genre and that could be true too. There are not many humans left and most of those who have survived the few years since nuclear oblivion are cannibals. There is no food and nothing can grow on the ruined land.

So, a father and son walk through a continent of ash in a nuclear winter. The question is, I suppose, what is the meaning of life when there is, literally, nothing to live for? There is no colour in this novel, everything is grey or a shade even more leached of light than grey. The father sometimes tries to describe to his son - for the boy was born after the end of the world - what the earth was once like. Then he realizes that to reconstruct the beauty he must construct the loss.

I think this would have to be the bleakest book I have ever read, albeit extraordinarily well written. There is a moment of illumination but it is the merest flicker of a dying candle. And I am left uncertain as to whether you would have to be Christian to respond to it or whether it is more inclusive than that. That is, if there is a God, it is nature and the earth itself, not an external force. Which is a beautiful idea.

As for McCarthy and women, well, let's not go there. As in any true Western they all die before the action begins and the glimpses we have of other women are monstrous whores or God's Police.

So, after all that, would I recommend you read it? Well, yes. Yes, I would. You'll just need a very stiff drink after it.

Update: Here is the Gurardian's review.

Permanent Link for this Article