We often use the term, “when hell freezes over” to describe one’s unwillingness to perform a particular action. In Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” hell has, in fact, frozen over and in our ignorant bliss we had never considered that the world we know as Earth, can very quickly become the physical place known as Hell.
Set in a post-apocolyptic wasteland known as the U.S. the reader follows an unnamed father and son on a journey westward, dodging cannibals and marauders, where there may or may not be safehaven. We don’t know the cause of the destruction but what has left me more intrigued is how the remaining survivors could have become so cruel, brutual and merciless. Animals are extinct, the sun is but a flickering candle that barely radiates through the thick and viscous air of smoke and ash and running waters run black and lifeless.
McCarthy’s narrative style is almost Biblical and though the descriptions are vivid, the horrific nature of it all is almost unfathomable. Unlike most pop-culture, post-apocolyptic worlds/survivors in novel and film, McCarthy has really left the world with nothing–No makeshift machines for weaponry, use or transport; no eccentric fashions from unlikely materials and no sole saving force representative of the light at the end of the very long and dark tunnel. The father and son trudge through difficult and chthonic landscapes and unrelenting weather–filthy, freezing, starving, and with a sanity kept alive by the love of the other. As McCarthy puts it, ”Each the other’s world entire.” They struggle to incubate the little hope they have for any kind of a better future–the young boy exhibiting an incredible sense of compassion and teaching the father that their goodness and love is worth surviving for.
Definitely a book worth reading because, like all great pieces of literature, there are messages embedded everywhere leaving us to believe that there is more to it all than meets the eye.
McCarthy was first highly acclaimed for his work, “No Country for Old Men” which he released in 2005. And in 2007, the film adaptation won an Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay Adaptation (Coen Brothers), and Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem). In the following year, McCarthy released “The Road” and for this won himself a Pulitzer Prize which indeed generates the excitement for it’s film adaptation to be released this upcoming November.
