I do like the "end of the world" scenarios a lot. They just spark my imaginations into countless "what if" scenarios. To the extent that on some crazy moments, I started thinking how I will fortify my house in the case of a zombie apocalypse! I am not joking. It makes a relaxing mental exercise. Try it someday.
I spent the greater parts of last November and December reading, watching and playing all sorts of stuff related to the apocalypse. The frenzy started with me reading Blindness during the last days of my exams... It made a great mood changer! Please read the last post to know what I thought of the novel (and its movie). Then I read the original 1950s novel I Am Legend, which I liked its 2008 movie adaptation a lot. After that I read the fantastic, breath-taking and mind-blowing The Road by Cormac McCarthy. And this reading session was concluded with one of Stephen King's best novels: The Stand. In this article I will be discussing The Road. I have already talked about Blindness, and God willing, I will write about the other 2 novels some other time.
During this frenzy, I watched a lot of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies and played the wonderful demo of Left 4 Dead. I was also hoping to walk a bit on the barren wastelands of Washington DC in Fallout 3, but it never happened. But nothing in this grim time reached the heights of The Road, and here is why...
The Road is a 2006 novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2007 and became a best seller. A movie adaptation is being made and will be released in 2009 starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron.
The novel follows a cataclysm whose nature is not mentioned at all in the whole novel. The events take place in North America in an unknown year and mostly about 10 years after the unknown cataclysm. A man and his son are trying to make escape the freezing north into the warmer south while heading east towards the ocean. Well, that's almost the whole story. But if you are not looking for events, but rather to an experience, then you will find plenty of this here. The story is incredibly grim and pessimistic. It will haunt you and personally I felt a huge psychological load on myself while I was reading it. The images are strong and memorable and the events in the novel so lifelike that it's really scary.
You never know what really happened. The sun is no longer visible from the dark clouds. All the plant and animal species are history. Food, fuel and clothes are no where to be found. Some people found out an alternate source for food: other humans. So you see, some people turned to cannibalism, capturing people and imprisoning them to eat them piece by piece. The fact that you never know what happened was an annoyance to a friend of mine that read the novel. But I see the opposite. It really means nothing to know what happened. In the first couple of years it might have been important, but after that, what's the point? The end is coming and no one can stop it. You just live long enough to see the next morning and that's all you dream of.
At first, I thought that this was too much, and I started making my thought protest as I did in Blindness, until I thought about it. 10 years is a lot of time. The survivors lost all their humanity if they have survived that long in a dying world. The man and his son are maybe the last of their kind. The man is of a dying breed and I thought that he must be some sort of a legend for his son. He tells his son stories about stuff that the boy never saw and never will. The boy never saw lots of things that we take for granted in our modern life. In one part of the novel, the man was trying to describe to his son what a cow was... The scene was so strong that it reminded me of a similar thing in Band of Brothers when a US soldier gave a little boy a piece of chocolate. The little boy took it while he looked a bit surprised. After taking a bite he started smiling. The little boy's father told the soldier that the boy never tasted chocolate before.
The trip of the man and his son across the dying American landscape with charred forests, ransacked houses, dead farms, derailed trains allowed me to reflect a bit about all the stuff that we can lose and that we already take for granted. For this sad couple, there was really no future. They are just living day to day with no long term goals. The boy asked his father what their long term goals were and the man was astonished to hear this sentence and asked the boy where he heard this before!
The man knows a lot of stuff and is a survivor, which is a given when you know that he stayed in that hell for so long, while doing his best to keep his son alive. He was underfed, cold and tired and in a constant danger of being eaten by the cannibals, but yet, his father did his best to keep him safe.
One of the strongest pictures that made its place in my memory is the picture of the man and his son walking together on the ever going Road while pushing their supermarket cart in front of them. It haunts me when I walk in the street. When I go to the supermarket. And when I think about the future.
This is one of the best novels that I have ever read in my life, and I think every adult should read it at some point in his/her life to know that we are living in a paradise and that in a blink of an eye, we can lose it all...
