The Road relates the journey, through a burned and
gray North American post-apocalyptic landscape, by a nameless father and
son pulling a shopping cart of belongings in their desperate search for food and clean water. Cormac McCarthy, the author does not explain the cataclysm, stating ‘We’re going to do ourselves in first’. The book reflects Stalin’s campaign against the Kulaks in 1930’s Russia. Cannibalism was rife.
The
man glassed, with his binoculars, the countryside again, looking for anything of colour. He hoped it would be brighter, where, for all he knew, the world grew darker daily. The waterways a gray sludge, a blackened jackstraw land. He noticed a house, shifting in and out of the curtain of soot like a
house in some uncertain dream.
They entered the house, broke in a cellar door to find captive naked men and women, they were rushed by four bearded men. Father and son escaped.
‘They were going to eat those people. It was a trap for us’.
‘Yes’.
The boy was the conscience of the father.
The man, the father, felt he was in the dying world the newly blind inhabit, it slowly fades from memory. The country was ravaged. They encountered a column of chained prisoners escorted by their brutal captors. A close encounter with a gang of human road-rats highlighted the daily danger. An abandoned nuclear fall-out cellar, fully provisioned, provided timely sustenance.
Father and son alternately succumb to sickness. The son fought back to health. The father was coughing blood – TB - certain death if left untreated.
‘Tell me a story’.
‘Yes. But in the stories we’re always helping people and we don’t help people’.
‘Stories are supposed to be happy’.
On their journey all stores of food had been exhausted and murder was everywhere upon the land. An abandoned ship provided cans of food and a flare pistol. They camped on the beach, sheltering under a tarpaulin.
They pass through a town. The father is hit by an arrow in the knee, he shoots his assailant with a flare. The injury is severe, he sutures it. The father succumbs to TB and dies on the beach.
The son is rescued by a well armed man who tells the boy he has a wife, a boy, his same age and a girl.
‘Do you eat people?’
‘No’
‘Are you the good people?
‘Yes’
Cormac McCarthy is a recluse. This novel provides
hope for humanity regardless of the travails of an unexplained calamity. This is his tenth book. The punctuation is sparse but does not impair the novel.
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