The Road

Is this the most depressing novel of the twenty-first century?

Quite possibly, but in its depiction of one man’s struggle to keep his son and himself alive in the blasted landscape of a post-apocalyptic world, it grips and impresses like the bitterest cold of winter.

Indeed, for most of the book, the man and the boy (we never discover their names) are on the run from the weather, seeking shelter from driving rain, the grey snow and the accumulated ash and soot. McCarthy only hints at what has happened, but clearly it is something very bad indeed: ‘In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators … Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.’

As the food began to run out, ‘blackened looters’ scrabbled in the rubble for tins of food, ‘the world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes.’ McCarthy leaves us in no doubt that, in extremis, humans will revert to the animal behaviour that lies within them in order to survive.

Through this blighted world the man and his son stagger and stumble. Day after day, they forage for food in abandoned buildings, careful all the while to stay out of sight and away from those who will steal their meagre supplies or worse. Occasionally, they come across appalling atrocities; often, their hunger brings them to the edge of death. However, there is always the pistol - with its lone bullet resting in its chamber – close to hand if survival becomes no longer desirable or possible.

Short paragraphs and the repetitious descriptions of the gray, ashen, blackened world through which the man and the boy progress reflect their monotonous, gruelling odyssey. Respite is infrequent and short-lived; the warmth of a fire is soon forgotten beneath a torrential downpour; a cache of hidden tins of food soon runs out. The boy is often terrified out of his wits: ‘He had his fists clutched at his chest and he was bobbing up and down with fear’.

And yet somehow they carry on.

Grim it may be, but the journey down this particular road makes us ask vital questions about existence. Why would anyone what to live in the wake of such a disaster? And if they did, how would it be possible to do so with dignity? McCarthy’s pared-down prose describes the wholesale annihilation of a society and all that it holds dear, but it also celebrates ingenuity and the will to survive in the face of utter hopelessness.