The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

In Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road, McCarthy transports the reader to a grim post-apocalyptic world. The main characters are “the man” and “the boy”. They are not given names. Their communication consists of sparse, simple dialog with recurring comments and questions. Many times, the boy says “I’m cold. I’m really cold” or “I’m scared. I’m really scared.” The man’s response is almost always a sympathetic “I know.”  The laconic dialog contrasts with the complex description of their surroundings in a gloomy palette of dark colors. This new world is covered in ash. The land is coated with it and buildings are permeated by it. The sky is perpetually cloudy, and the air is dirty. McCarthy describes “The grainy air. The taste of it never left your mouth.”  Homes are empty and almost always looted of anything of value.  Forests are burned and “the roadside hedges were gone to rows of black and twisted brambles.”

The man and the boy are heading south to the coast, all the while struggling to survive. Their enemies are hunger, cold and other wanderers on the road. In their peripatetic existence, each encounter with a new place or rarely a new person is associated with a sense of impending doom. Almost every night is spent camping outside in the cold with inadequate shelter.

As the story unfolds the situation proves to be even darker and then horrific.  People, animals and fish are almost all dead. There is no industry, no agriculture, no technology, no civilization. Unburied corpses occupy otherwise abandoned towns. McCarthy describes “the mummified dead everywhere… the flesh cloven along the bones…shriveled and drawn like latter-day bog folk”

The few survivors eke out, at best, a miserable subsistence existence, living on remnants of the old world: the scant remaining non-perishable food, clothing and equipment. A can of fruit found in an abandoned home is a rare treat. Unrelieved hunger drives some to unspeakable sins.

The nature of the catastrophe terminating life as we know it is not revealed, but McCarthy was born in 1933 and grew up in a world where nuclear weapons capable of terrible destruction became a reality, likely inspiring the powerful story told in The Road.

This is a great book, and I strongly recommend it, but be prepared for its disturbing and cautionary message.