The Road

*warning: amateurish literary criticism ahead*

It's written by Cormac McCarthy. Simply based on the events that McCarthy describes in his books, even though he is just an author, I would be very nervous talking to him.

A couple years ago I read Blood Meridian, also by McCarthy, and that book has stuck with me like a scar. After recently reading Lonesome Dove, I thought those two books make for interesting comparisons. Both are somewhat epic westerns; in both, life is brutal and short. But in Lonesome Dove, that's the kind of life it is in the unsettled west. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy uses the setting to delve deeply and darkly into man's base nature, into what happens when there are no laws and no foreseeable consequences, and he ponders just whom this new world would attract, who would thrive. It's not pretty, or terrible hopeful, and nowhere near redeeming.

So when I heard that The Road was not only this year's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel but also Oprah's-Book-Club novel #48 or so, I was curious. Had McCarthy toned down the brutality? Had he found hope? I mean, if it's Oprah, it's gotta be redeeming, right?

Apparently not. It's dark. Really, really dark. Mel Gibson's Mad Max movies, as a comparison, portrayed a post-apocalyptic world with cartoonish violence in the bright sunshine, which was sort of fun. McCarthy's apocalypse has no end, no escape, no hope, and it's hard for me to feel the "they tried to survive nobly, that makes it worthwhile" vibe from this one. It's over in this one folks, let's make that clear, and the Donner Party couldn't be more desperate.

I don't know how OBC works, but I wonder if a number of its followers were lead down paths that they would not willingly tread. Which is not necessarily bad, but I wouldn't try to convince someone to come on the horror show ride with me.

While I was mostly horrified while reading the book, in hindsight, I guess in the end that The Road is a study of irrational hope. Most people are inherently hopeful, they get up when they've been struck down, they wake up the day after, they keep going. For a typical plot, the characters have goals and we see if and how they achieve them by the end. It is quite clear in The Road that the world is irrevocably turning into a great ball of lifeless dust--there are no scenes of flowers poking through the ashes--yet people keep on living, they manufacture goals, they ignore the voices that tell them there's no point.

What am I taking away from The Road? It may seem odd, but as a resident of a major-earthquake-prone state, it's got me thinking that it's finally time to at least have a serious and well-stocked emergency preparedness kit. Or to get a good fallout shelter built in the back (ah, but I'm renting...). This is after a reading a few hundred pages or so where one of the protagonists' greatest achievements is finding some canned peaches.

PS. Not a bicycle to be found in the book--obviously the bikes saw the writing on the wall and left the planet before things went to hell.