Go out and purchase Cormac McCarthy’s new novel The Road. It’s devastating.
Truth be told, I bought it because its premise is one I’ve tried to write a novel about: a father and son scraping to survive in a blasted world, post-nuclear war. Cormac beat me to it and I’m glad he did. The Road is vivid and bone-spare, one of those ultimate morality tales where the doomed and doomed to be good stand in defiance of total meaninglessness. I’m not even exaggerating.
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
Wow.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the final word in post-apocalyptic parables. Eat your heart out Mad Max and The Stand.
Picture Lord of the Flies as a near-future Western, tutored by Waiting for Godot, with a heaping helping of The Road to Perdition thrown in. With prose so miserly Hemingway sounds verbose in comparison. Blinding love at the end of days. Big, big theme.
And yes, there are cannibals. Read this damn book.
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