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The unsettled international atmosphere -- terrorism, nuclear proliferation, religious tension, war -- inevitably makes people reflect on what life would be like after a globe-shattering cataclysm. Nowadays, Mad Max looks less like entertainment and more like a how-to guide on hoarding crucial resources.
The wildly admired writer Cormac McCarthy presents his own post-apocalyptic vision in The Road. The result is his most compelling, moving and accessible novel since All the Pretty Horses.
Part fable, part science fiction, total nightmare, the novel presents the story of a man and his young son traveling through a devastated American landscape. Some terrible holocaust has left the world sunless. Vast amounts of ash obscure the sun's rays. There are no crops, few living things except humans, no foliage. No warmth.
Ages, names, cities are dispensed with, giving the story an eerie simplicity. Father and son are looking for the sea, foraging for canned food and fleeing from gangs of armed men.
All semblance of safety and order have vanished.
Cannibalism offers a mode of survival, so the strong hunt the weak as food. Like medieval warlords wielding hand-hewn weaponry, these men march through a pitiless terrain. They rape, they enslave, they kill, they eat.
McCarthy makes it clear that many human beings will commit any atrocity imaginable in order to keep on living. He offers an extraordinarily bleak though convincing analysis of our species. For the boy's mother, choosing to kill herself was better than waiting to die and be eaten or life as a slave.
Many authors have imagined a post-nuclear world. McCarthy is particularly well-suited to the task because he writes so beautifully and convincingly about violence, despair and men in desperate situations.
The Road immerses the reader in the father and son's hunger and fear. But there also is courage. They keep on going. McCarthy brilliantly captures the knife edge that fugitives in a hostile world stand on.
The father must balance the need to search for food in abandoned houses with vigilance. Too much caution and you'll starve, too little and you'll be killed.
This makes for genuine suspense. Where does The Road end?
There are subtle references to the Bible, Greek mythology and history. But amid this Godot-like bleakness, McCarthy shares something vital and enduring about the boy's spirit, his father's love and the nature of bravery itself.
The Road
By Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 242 pp., $24
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