Just read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Terrifying and beautiful in equal measure.
Anybody read it?
I believe it’s going to be made into a
movie. The mind boggles.
Yes, I read it. It gave me nightmares and I walked around in a funk for a long time. Even now I still think sometimes about the uselessness of this or that if this were the end of the world. All these silly things like iPhones or the Internet or slaving away at some stupid job. When the end of the world comes all that will matter is food, water and shelter.
One thing is certain, even if things got that bad I think you’d still want to kill some time making music.
right. the child had a flute, recall, his father
made for him. He threw it away.
In case people don’t know, the story is about
a father and his young son walking
through a post-Apocalypse USA, everything
dead and covered with ash.
It’s freezing cold. They’re trying to get to
the sea where they hope it will be
warmer. They’re pushing a grocery cart
with whatever food in it they can find
in empty houses and stores, and they
have to keep moving and hiding at night because there
are bands of cannibals who eat whomever
they find. Most of the book they are freezing
and starving, going days without food.
And these two love each other, ‘each is a world
unto the other.’ The father is dedicated to
keeping his son alive. The boy is very
real and also, in the midst of this horror,
good. The father believes the boy is the
Messiah or something like that. Looking
at the boy he thinks: ‘If he isn’t the word
of God God never spoke.’
Imagine the movie!
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?p=693024&highlight=cormac#693024
I read the book in one sitting this summer. You’re right: Beautiful and terrifying. Apart from “The Rape of Nanking,” the most personally disturbing book I’ve ever read. It really continues to affect me in ways hard to describe.
A movie is coming. Not yet shot, but promised for 2009. They’re negotiating with Viggo Mortensen for the lead.
I honestly don’t know if I will be able to watch it.
I subsequently read Blood Meridian, then the Border trilogy, then No Country for Old Men, which is also just now coming out as a movie. N.C.F.O.M. is almost like a light comedy after The Road. A completely bleak story about a serial killer–but by contrast to The Road…
Viggo is perfect. And the kid?
I don’t see how they can film this without
pulling a lot of punches. The thing is so
bleak, how will they get a mass audience?
You know, babies being eaten, people
chained in cellars, their limbs being
harvested by cannibals…
When I was a kid they would, like, film a tragedy
and give it a happy ending. No more.
A lot of men seem to focus a lot of the relationship between the boy and the father. I kind of thought the characters seemed kind of fake and I especially hated the dialog when the mother was talking about suicide. That seemed so fake and overly dramatic I almost didn’t read the rest of the book.
The only part I felt was believable was the setting. It seemed to splash across my mind’s eye like a film. Imagining what that would be like and what it must have been like in the intervening time between the blinding flash of light and their journey was the part of the book I found compelling.
The wife, about to commit suicide:
You can’t protect us. You say you would die for us but what good is that? I’d take him with me if it weren’t for you.
You know I would. It’s the right thing to do.
You’re talking crazy.
No, I’m speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him.
They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won’t face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen.
But I can’t. I can’t.
More dialogue. The man and his son, camping by the road in the rain.
Can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?
Some time. Not now.
And we’re still going south.
Yes.
So we’ll be warm.
Yes.
OK.
OK what?
Nothing. Just OK.
Go to sleep.
OK.
I’m going to blow out the lamp. Is that OK?
Yes. That’s okay.
And then later in the darkness: can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course you can.
What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
OK.
McCarthy dedicated the book to his own son.
He’s writing from his heart.
Anyone of you looking to get rid of it cheap?
I am always looking for a book to read. PM me if you are interested.
Apart from the cannibals the struggle they face sounds like it could be someone trying to survive living on the streets of Chicago in the winter.
I just thought the wife’s dialog about suicide being her lover was way over the top.
See what you mean.
SPOILER ALERT
(sort of)
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Actually, I don’t think I’m giving anything away that’s not in all the reviews and the jacket blurbs.
What disturbed me about the book is that the situation of the book is plausible, or at least I think it is. It’s essentially a nuclear winter scenario, although it’s not entirely clear whether it’s due to a nuclear bombs or maybe a meteor hitting the earth.
But, the situation appears entirely hopeless for the future of life on the planet. The sun is obstructed by ash in the atmosphere. It’s always dark and cold. All wildlife and most domestic animals are gone. There’s little or no vegetation. People have been surviving on food stores–those are getting depleted. Roving bands of cannibals survive. We don’t know how many people are left.
What drives the father and his son to continue their journey? Where are they going? What hope, if any, exists?
A movie with a related theme is “Children of Men.” Something happens, and no babies have been born for 18 or 20 years, I forget. What happens to civilization when no hope for the future of humanity exists?
Although I worry about this less than I did when my children were younger, I used to wonder about a catastrophic scenario like this. For me, few nightmares are worse than the idea of being responsible for a family you love and being unable to meet their basic needs. (And I’m ever mindful that this is a nightmare visited upon millions, right now, all over the world.) It never caused me, as it does some, to go the survivalist route. I keep about 3 or 4 weeks worth of food and water and some basic medical supplies. Enough to hope that the government will come sweeping in and rescue us within the first month or so after a huge disaster. (Just like they did in Katrina, right?)
But, I’m fascinated by the speculation about what would happen to human culture in a hopeless scenario. No babies being born, a clearly finite future–the asteroid heading this way, or whatever.
The thing with that book was that it really sucked you in to that world. The imagery is so graphic. But when you started thinking about it, it all seemed just way too implausible. Why would humans survive but virtually no other life? At the least there should be rats, cockroaches and other vermin, and indeed there was evidence of droppings or something, but I would think there’d be tons of vermin. After all, when everything died something decayed it all.
Also, living in a place with catastrophic wildfires, it’s amazing how everything comes back. Granted nuclear winter might put a damper on things rebounding, but I guess I just have a lot more faith in life to survive catastrophe. Life always finds a way, as has been said in another movie.
The father thinks the boy is holy.
He says: ‘If he is not the word of God God never spoke.’
He believes he has been appointed by God to keep
the boy alive.
He often sees light radiating from him.
‘He lay watching the boy at the fire. …
Look around you, he said. There is no
prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who is
not honored here today. Whatever form you
spoke of you were right.’
Dialogue–Father to child:
"You have to carry the fire.
I don’t know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real? The fire?
Yes it is.
Where is it? I don’t know where it is.
Yes you do. It is inside you. I can see it."
There is something holy about the boy,
cause, though he is just a boy and very real,
he is good. And their love and kindness to one
another while the world is dying and they’re
freezing and starving and being hunted
by cannibals. The fire they carry is the
goodness of humanity, I think, and somehow
their going on and having hope in these
impossible circumstances is the remaining light
of the world.
Have you read Earth Abides? If not, you would almost certainly
like that.
Poetry gives you imaginary gardens with real toads in them,
it’s been said.
The world in the novel is imaginary and incredible, as you say.
But these people are really in that world, living one moment
after another. The incredible starkness is there for
a reason.
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can.
- JRRT
djm
I thought about that and you make a good point. I don’t think the basic idea that the “animals had died” required the reader to believe that there was no animal life left at all.
Also, living in a place with catastrophic wildfires, it’s amazing how everything comes back.
Gotta have sunlight for that. That’s the thing. The sun is heavily filtered by the ash, and there’s a thick covering of ash on the ground. It’s bitterly cold. You don’t get recovery under those conditions.
That said, it’s not a scientific text. Not really even science fiction in the way most people think about it.
Yes. Almost exactly my reaction. No nightmares, but a funk for sure. And, you sort of look around at all the ridiculous stuff we have and all the silly and empty pursuits and you go, oh, what is this crap? What the hell are we doing?
There is at least one dog, maybe. What I find hard to believe
is that any people would have survived. I mean, even the fishes
in the sea are probably dead.
You know, we don’t know the names of anybody in
the novel or what they did before the apocalypse.
The book is functioning on several levels,
one of which is fable. It is real and unreal both.
It’s a fable about hope and goodness against all odds.
The environment is arranged accordingly.