Books of 2008, Part IX

I already finished another book! This week I read the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It is the story of an unnamed protagonist and his son, traveling along, well, the road in a postapocalyptic America. The world has been completely and utterly destroyed by a presumable nuclear holocaust (one flashback scene suggests that this is the case) several years ago, and McCarthy does a great job of describing the devastation. The world is covered by blowing ash, the sky is darkened due to all the dust and ash in the atmosphere, and everything is dead.

Actually this is one of the only postapocalyptic novels I've read (and I've read a lot of them) that bothers to take into account the effect of the apocalypse on nature. In McCarthy's world, all the animals and plants are dead, too; not just people. Honestly the idea that cats and dogs, and birds and fish are wiped out saddens me a lot more than knowing that billions of people died. Anyway.

The story concerns the man and his son as they journey towards the coast, where they believe they will find something, though they don't really know what. They push along a cart with some scavenged food and other goods, with only a small revolver to protect them from whoever else they might meet along the way. Due to the extreme scarcity of all other food sources, cannibalism has become fairly common amongst the remaining survivors, and this practice separates the "good guys" from everyone else.

The Road is unrelentingly bleak, as befits a story about a world with absolutely no future and no hope. It's written in a peculiar prose, with McCarthy eschewing quotation marks and apostrophes, and even complete sentences. Much of it is written like this. As if the characters can't afford the energy to think in complete sentences. Not hard to read, though. Surprisingly.

It is a beautiful and moving story, and even the ending was plausible and felt like a nice resolution. The story is all the more horrifying because we all know it's within the realm of possibility. To think of what could be thrown away so easily, and what kinds of nuclear horrors we're capable of, is really terrifying. Makes you want to hug the nearest cat or dog.