Ah, the new year. A time to party. A time to think about life-improving resolutions. A time to get married, if you are my cousin. But for me, the new year was a time to think about the landscape of nuclear winter, for the first book I read in the new year was “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy.
McCarthy tells of a father and son who follow the titular road south, in hopes of better climates. They scavenge for food and fend off the “bad guys”, who commit such heinous acts that bad guys seems like kind of an understatement. They have to go on, claims the father to his son, because they are the good guys, and they are carrying the fire. Yet the father knows he is dying, and he wonders to himself several times whether he will have the strength to kill his son when the time comes, for that would be a death more merciful than any other kind the boy might face on the road.
I read this book for many reasons, primarily because Entertainment Weekly named it the best book of the past 25 years. (#2? “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”) Also, it won a Pulitzer, but I’m more inclined to trust the Entertainment Weekly people than the Pulitzer people.
I think this book is a sort of litmus test for how a person will deal in a post-apocalyptic world. Granted, I don’t have any children, but I frequently found myself wanting the father to go ahead and kill the son because the son was just a huge fraidy-cat and there just didn’t seem to be that much to live for in this world of theirs. There didn’t seem to be one bit of hope left anywhere. This, of course, is all the evidence you need that I will be absolutely useless to anyone else in the nuclear winter. You shouldn’t root for the main characters of a book to die even though the world they live in sucks. You shouldn’t root for fathers to kill sons. That is what I learned from reading “The Road.” Rather, you should aim to be a good guy who is carrying fire. A lack of good guys carrying the fire is probably what got the world into the mess that the characters in “The Road” are dealing with.
And, as Whitney Houston once said, “children are the future.” So that is probably why the father felt compelled to go south with his son, even though the son just complained and was scared and wanted to give all their food away. The son is the future. The son is carrying the fire. This book will probably mean more to people who have children than it did to me. Though I did really enjoy the beautiful and evocative language.
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4 comments:
Hmmm...so I qualify as someone who has kids and I read this book. I thought it was beautifully written -- but I'm with you...I found it pretty damn depressing. Though to be honest, I've just remembered that I read it in Hawaii lying by a pool. So the book was depressing, but my kids were back on the mainland and I had a fruity drink by my side...so I never considered having to actually kill them. This isn't a very helpful comment, is it?
But did you want to kill the fictional kid? I wanted to kill the fictional kid like 20 pages in. He was always scared and whining. I feel like maybe people who have kids wouldn't have that feeling. I think that's the difference.
OR MAYBE NO ONE SHOULD LEAVE ME ALONE WITH CHILDREN.
I do remember that the kid whined a lot. And I hate whining. I tend to yell at my kids when they whine (which they hate!), but even when I'm really pissed off I never think about killing them -- so maybe you have a point. As a parent, I guess I did understand why the dad didn't kill his kid even though the kid was a pain in the butt and life seemed pretty meaningless.
No one told me this book was about nuclear winter! Post-apocalyptic titles are perhaps my favorite genre. Thanks, Molly's book reviews!
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