Monday, August 16, 2010

The Road - Cormack McCarthy

Or... how to keep yourself sleepless.... Not just because it is a gripping read, but because it haunted me!

"The Road" is a tale about a man and his son surviving in a post apocolyptic world, when everything is dead or dying, and everyone is scavenging what remains of food, from cans and packets, or worse, eating other people. Everything else that is usable is running out - ammunition, shoes, clothing, wood for making fires. The boy's mother features in the man's memories, but has died by the time the story starts. They meet some characters along the way, and none are what you'd call friendly.

When given something deep and/or worrisome or disturbing to think about, I am prone to insomnia. "The Road" is the first book I've read in a long time that has stuck with me so vividly, and kept me awake far, far into the night. The plots of many other books (and movies) become fuzzy soon after reading them, but the events of this book return to my brain regularly, and I read this months ago.

Why? Several reasons:

- a key plot point is never explained. You never find out what exactly happened to the world. It is kind of implied that there has been a nuclear war, but you don't know why, or how this all unfolded. It is a few years in the past when the story starts, and you just get snippets of it from the man's memories. This is plenty to wonder about.
- people driven to the edge. Resources are so scarce that you kill or be killed. Some resort to cannibalism. Some try to retain their humanity. What is humanity? It's a fine line when protecting those you love at times. What would be the point of life under these circumstances?
- parenting. All the big questions, such as how to best instill the/your key values in children? can you pass on everything that is important before you die? would you really want to have children faced with such a bleak future? Can you always find things to hope for? How do children view the world you grew up in?

These are not just questions for the grim circumstances of the book. I understand that the author, who became a parent in his 50's or 60's, and is faced with reaching old age sooner than most parents, wrote this about his own fears of not being able to pass everything important on to his son before he dies. Another part of the story is the mother's story, told through the man's memories. She is pregnant at the time the nuclear war (presumably) starts, and the boy is born soon after. She finds she can't feel optimistic at all in a post-apocalyptic world. As a woman, naturally, she has different fears.

A highly recommended read.

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