The Road

I just finished a James Patterson novel in about two days, and while it was fun and engaging, it's gone. On the other hand, I read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy just last week before Thanksgiving, and it continues to resonate.

Set in a grizzly post-nuclear war wasteland, the novel can be read as a father and son travel tale. "The man" never is named, we never know his former profession, height, appearance--the story seems void of most of the conventional trappings of character development. "The boy" likewise is universally undefined; not even his age is clear. It's hard to tease out exactly how long ago the world was torched, but I'm guessing about six or seven years. Throughout the book, the two encounter a few other people, a lot of corpses, bones and skulls.

They are on a march south, to somewhere that may be warm and not overcast (from what I interpret to be Nuclear Winter). Everything seems hopeless, except the goal, and even that seems more of a mindset than a reality. They seem to be gritty survivors more than victims, but the man's wife argues they are not even that:

We're survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp.
Survivors? she said.
Yes.
What in God's name are you talking about? We're not survivors. We're the walking dead in a horror film.

The wife's description sums up everyone they meet. No one is well, suggesting that radiation, ash, no health care--all the above--is wearing everyone left on down to the bone. Description and imagery like made the book so seizing to me: Wearing masks and goggles , sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators.

I've read many post-apocalyptic yarns, but this one is getting a place on my shelf next to Jonathan Schnell's non-fiction nuclear war scare book The Fate of the Earth. It has a degree of credibility and sensation to it like few I've read before, and yet it's speculative fiction, describing a world I hope we never come to know. McCarthy's depth of detail and creativity astound me.

This was most evident to me in the way the man and boy value things that we take for granted: a shopping cart, a blanket, a tarp, a Kool-aid pack. Little details of their lives take on seismic significance, like when the boy accidentally leaves the gas turned on a propane lamp, a recent find they treasured for its heat and light. They find a smattering of cornmeal in a cabinet and carefully sift the mouse feces and dirt from it before making little corn cakes which they savor. The attention to scarcity, the MacGuyver-like resourcefulness, and the unique approach to survival--all incredibly imaginative.

Had I read this book seven years ago, before I started down the path of fatherhood, I would have missed a great deal of the novel's potency. I might have offered something like the blurb on the cover, that The Road "is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best of what we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation."

Now, however, I find the book is truly all about fatherhood, in the absolute most challenging situation one might imagine. The man wakes at night to put his hand on his son's chest to feel his heart and breathing. Sometimes he does this when the boy is terribly ill or cold, times when life would seem to be fragile. Other times he does this in reverence. The man, I gather, has taught this boy everything he knows, and I believe the boy knew no other life before the bomb (sad as that is, the boy, under his father's leadership, has values and a good spirit). Still, the boy comes up with phrases and ideas that surprise his father (just like my boys do, but they are surrounded by inputs). Their relationship is the heart of the book, and it's a must-read for any dad.

In fact, for anyone who's needing a hero, I suggest reading The Road. While the man may not act like Mad Max or that Kostner character from Waterworld, his small acts, like giving a last morsel of food to his son, make him a hero. He tells his son they are the good guys, the keepers of the flame, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Now I find, while looking for a book jacket image, that this novel has been made into (what appears to be a respectable) film. It is scheduled for release in 2009!