I read The Road in one day, before and after
work and during lunch. Once I started reading this book, I
didn’t want to stop. The most wonderful quality of fiction
is its ability to transport the reader into another world. For
me, the “real” world outside the book ceases to
exist, and I find myself someplace else. In this case, the place
where the story takes place is a post-apocalyptic world which
seems to be about a decade after the collapse of global
civilization and the nuclear holocaust. Stored food has mostly
disappeared; there are few animals that are not extinct, and the
remaining humans have taken to cannibalizing each other to
survive.
The Road was released as a feature film earlier this year,
starring Viggo Mortensen, who plays the character of the father
of a young boy, born after the world collapsed into an uncertain
future. The boy’s mother, played by Charlize Theron who
very briefly appears in the film, is only a memory the father
holds dear. She chose suicide rather than risk being captured,
and who knows what else by the men whose hearts were overtaken by
evil. The father and son are trying to get to a warmer place,
traveling South for warmth, and West to the sea, although the
father knows all along that he is dying. He has a map and a
shopping cart. They travel along a road, with binoculars and a
rear view mirror, always on the lookout. The father carries a
pistol, starting out with only three bullets. They search for
abandoned stores and houses where they can find any remaining
canned food items. Most of the time they starve; occasionally
they get lucky. But there are threats, in the form of bad guys.
The bad guys carry hand fashioned weapons like pipes and chains,
using some of their captives as slaves and others as food.
Harrowing images abound. Reading this book, entering this world,
and then stepping back into “reality” the real world
seems too bright, too easy. Even the bums living under the
underpass to the freeway have it easy compared to the people in
this world. The characters’ hunger and hyper vigilant
alertness is contagious. Your heart races when they hear the
crackling of leaves, or see smoke, or open a door. When they
arrive at what is ultimately the end of the road, your heart
breaks with theirs, and through the tears, along with the little
boy, you hold out a hope, for goodness.
And then the story is over, and you are left to wonder if one of
the characters they’d met was right—the one who said
that before the apocalypse (although they never use the word) he
knew this was coming. You have to hope, for the sake of all the
world’s children, that human ethics evolve along with our
technological capacity for destruction—so that a worst case
scenario can be averted.