required reading

There are hints of Autumn in the air; a cool and fresh morning bringing a welcome end to the claggy warmth that passed for Summer. And I'm lucky enough to have a good walk to work, over the marshes past Mesopotamia, through the university parks which are bursting with colour, and into the picturesque and oh-so-trendy Jericho. Someone had put a lilly on top of a phone box.

The world depicted in The Road has no resemblance to the world I walked into this morning, so that it is strange and alienating even to think about it. This novel, by Cormac McCarthy tells of a father and son who are walking across a postapocalyptic America, following the road south. Their world has suffered what we presume to be a nuclear holocaust: everything is dead, everything is grey. They scavenge for food, they avoid any other human beings, and they follow the road.

The novel is unrelentingly bleak (gray, black, ash, dead, cold - all these words recur with numbing frequency), punctured with moments of sheer horror. The vision is lightened, perhaps, by the depiction of the relationship between the man and his child, though unlike others, I did not find this to be over-sentimental, but rather desperate. The dialogue between the two is stripped bare of punctuation and is repetitive to the point almost of absurdity:

You think we're going to die, dont you?
I dont know.
We're not going to die.
Okay.
But you dont believe me.
I dont know.
Why do you think we're going to die.
I dont know.
Stop saying I dont know.
Okay.
Why do you think we're going to die?
We dont have anything to eat.
We'll find something.
Okay.
How long do you think people can go without food?
I dont know.
But how long do you think?
Maybe a few days.
And then what? You fall over dead?
Yes.
Well you dont. It takes a long time. We have water. That's the most important thing. You dont last very long without water.
Okay.
But you dont believe me.
I dont know.
He studied him. Standing there with his hands in the pockets of the outsized pinstriped suitcoat.
Do you think I lie to you?
No.
But you think I might lie to you about dying?
Yes.
Okay. I might. But we're not dying.
Okay.

All that makes our world so rich and confusing has been stripped away: 'the world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entries'. What is left when society, infrastructure, and culture are gone is the relationship between the father and the child. This is what is essential, McCarthy seems to say. This relationship is one of love and protection, because the father and son are 'the good guys', if we use the language of the novel. When every part of life is pared away, the way we choose to act is either unselfish, good, and loving, or it is selfish, murderous, and animalistic.

I found this to be the most problematic aspect of the novel. McCarthy wants us to feel the agonising uncertainty in the battle between good and evil. There are so many 'bad guys' in this world, and so few 'good guys' left; can the good guys stay alive, and 'carry the flame'; who will triumph at the end? By implication, McCarthy seems to include us with the good guys; certainly our sympathies lie unreservedly with the boy and his father. Then how is it that there are so many of the 'bad guys'? And who were they before this apocalypse? What did they look like? Could we point to them and say that, stripped down to their core, they are inhumane and evil? Were they, are they, any different from us, now? The world of good and evil that McCarthy paints in The Road belongs to the child; for a novel almost entirely composed of the adjective 'gray', it is surprisingly black and white.