The Road by Cormack McCarthy

The Road by Cormack McCarthy

I began re-reading this just before the Grand Final Replay and I finished it on Sunday and it was a good thing to read in the wake of that match. It made me truly grateful to be living in a world where the loss of my friends’ team in a Grand Final (not even my team!) could actually count as a terrible event.

I first read this about three years ago. I had tried McCarthy once or twice before, one of his huge epic westerns probably, and I didn’t get it at all. But after George Monbiot described The Road as “the most important environmental book ever written” I gave it a go. (See http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/30/the-road-well-travelled/) I don’t remember a book that consumed me like this before. I felt sick in the stomach while I read it and the feeling didn’t go away when I put it down. It was so vivid and the world it described was so real that my actual life at that time seemed fake. I would talk to people in the few days it took me to get through it and it was like talking to people in a dream. “You don’t realise,” I felt like saying, “this isn’t real. In the real world all life except human life has ended, the world is reduced to ashes and murderers lurk behind every corner.”

I cleaned out the garden shed at work at this time and it was a cold day with a chilling wind and poking through the dirt and rags in the shed I felt exactly like the characters in the novel going through the debris of a lost civilization. And one night, maybe my second day of reading, I was so appalled and frightened at the turn of events in the novel that I had to put it down for fear of not being able to sleep were I to read any further. I picked up Bill Bryson’s Notes from a small island as a pre-bedtime antidote but it was weak tea to McCarthy’s moonshine and it didn’t do the job at all. (By this I mean no disrespect to Bryson whom I love greatly.)

So there you have it. If you think things are crook you can read The Road and real life doesn’t seem so bad. A world with sunshine and plentiful food and laughing children appears as paradise. Well, maybe it is.