The Road

The Road is a distressing, haunting and emotionally shattering tale of survival in hopeless circumstances, of the ever-present Grim Reaper that encroaches like night over day and of the worst kind of moral decay possible in a world utterly ruined by unnamed and unknown calamities, only hinted at throughout the book, but never fully revealed, adding to the reader's growing and nagging discomfort as he/she remains a helpless bystander on The Road.

I've never read such a hopeless, dreadful (the first definition in the Oxford Dictionary) struggle for survival – but, at the same time, the attention given to the practical aspects of human survival, what resilient people do in order to survive, at various intervals, somehow still manages to impart a glimmer of hope. Then… just as suddenly … repeatedly … things happen that reminds us of Nietzsche's nihilistic pessimism: “Hope is the worst of all evils, for it prolongs the torment of man.”

Most people have chosen malicious means of survival in a world where no animals and no plants of any kind are alive anymore. The consequences are unimaginable, yet McCarthy succeeds brilliantly through juxtaposing literary themes such as good versus evil, death, trust, faith and doubt against paternal love to depict the horrors of cannibalism in such a realistic fashion that as the reader you almost come to understand the behavior required for survival in such dire circumstances that may ordinarily seem crazy. The logic of herding and caging people as a food source in the cellar of a house is almost palpable … almost. The utter gut-wrenching scene of a headless human infant on a spit over the fire brings home the sheer madness and desperation created by the apocalypse when people abandon the most basic principles of morality just to stay alive.

Facing such atrocities, amongst many other trials and tribulations, the man and (particularly) the boy retain an unexplainable purity of hope and strength of vision as they journey across the desolate landscape. The boy's capacity to believe in other people's goodness is astounding and ultimately leads to a major conflict when the pair confronts a thief towards the end of the novel. The man, in a manner that the boy finds completely immoral, punishes the thief. After some debate, the man agrees to help the thief, but found that he has disappeared off the road. “We did kill him,” the boy then announces. Is this the passing of the “old guard,” of a vision towards a new world where the old generation, suspicious, threatening and responsible for the calamities in the world are being surpassed by a younger, hopeful and moral generation? Radiantly, it acts as yet another commentary on our human condition – that the distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” is not at all that obvious. Early in the book, the father kills for the sake of his son. The man does not consider violence or killing in the defense of his son evil. As the reader, however, you wonder: what makes this choice more praiseworthy than the choices of the people who ensnare, kill and cannibalize others in order to survive?

We are never told what led to the destruction of the world. On the road that the boy and the man travel together, no “godspoke men” exist. This term may allude to prophets, a theme elaborated on when the two travelers encounter Ely, the only person named in the book. The prophets are gone, having “taken the world with them.” Is this a suggestion that some kind of religious war has destroyed human civilization? The aftermath of 9/11, perhaps, or rather, that the moral world was completely destroyed by the universal destruction, lying to waste the moral principles commonly seen as religious values? By showing the reader only a few burned out, bleak, barren and ghastly snippets of what might have happened to the world, McCarthy anchors the apocalyptic aftermath itself as one of the major characters in this horror adventure, always casting an ever-darkening shadow on the reader's own psyche, asking poignantly what he/she might have done in similar circumstances. The answer to that question is the real horror.

Michael Chabon, in explaining why The Road is not science fiction, arguably penned the most appropriate definition of the book: “ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road is best understood.” Science fiction is what is marketed as science fiction – almost everything that is labeled with “science fiction” is science fiction, but there is great deal which is not so labeled which, in terms of approach and content, seems to belong to the same category. One of Chabon's own books, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, is a case in point, at best described as “fringe” science fiction, but a winner of the Hugo Award in 2008, nonetheless. Other such examples are David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, nominated for the Nebula Award in 2004, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and P.D. James' The Children of Men (1992). Certainly, Cormac McCarthy made his name outside the field of science fiction, with noticeable titles such as No Country for Old Men (2005), Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992) and will probably be offended if he is to be reckoned as a science fiction writer per se based on his dark, apocalyptic odyssey in The Road, when – by his own admission during a rare interview, with Oprah Winfrey – he was inspired by his own little boy, asleep, in a hotel room in El Paso. In the middle of the night he stared out the window wondering what the city might look like in 50 or 100 years, picturing fires on the hill, a vision frequently drawn throughout The Road.

Regardless of the debate about the value of or what constitutes science fiction or not, suffice to say that the genre ultimately enables us to face ourselves, the resonating message: that people like the boy will always “carry the fire” – that of human compassion. Sadly, the real truth is that the world is often too much like the one in The Road, with far too many people seeming to choose self-preservation at the cost of genuine human concern for others. Our more complex world is not as simple as the tradeoff involved in killing others in order to survive. As science fiction often does, McCarthy highlights our human nature as a parable in The Road: the fire of human compassion is all too easily extinguished when we encounter harsh conditions. Like H.G. Wells' greatest scientific romance, The Time Machine, we see a bleak vision of human advancement, witnessed by the abandoned train in the middle of the woods, confirming a pessimistic, dystopian view of the future, where environmental decay is evident. Wells' traveler himself "thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end." We do get to see some hope in the two withered flowers given to the traveler by the Eloi woman, "to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived in the heart of man." Similarly, we experience hope at the end of The Road, when the boy's moral resilience triumphs over his mere survival instinct, allowing him to trust the veteran and ultimately, we think, leading to his survival, achieving his father's initial goal of ensuring just that.

It is encouraging to see a body of work with its focus on environmental calamities, such as The Windup Girl, receiving many accolades and awards. The realization of the puny nature of humans in the face of a cold and indifferent (heartless?) universe and of humanity at the whim of cold and indifferent processes such as evolution, are all the stuff of science fiction. It is not surprising that George Mobiat declared McCarthy to be one of the "50 people who could save the planet … [The Road] could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem." The Road is science fiction, because science fiction changes the way we view the world.

I have rated the book 10, my first perfect score at WWE. It is one of the best books I have ever read. Because it is science fiction? Yes, partly, but mainly because I am a father who also hopes for a bright future for my son.