The Road Corman Mc Carthy

As it happened I read The Road, by Corman McCarthy on the road in heavy weather, finishing it late at night in solitude at home. These are almost the ideal circumstances to read this dark tale of a post apocalyptic world. It is dark beyond darkness, the sun and moon can bring no light, ash covers everything in a burned America. It is a post-climate change, a post-nuclear war… Whatever, it doesn’t matter. Emptiness, bareness, fear of others, the bad guys who do eat humans since there is nothing else to eat and the good guys… well they break your heart. Stark and unsentimental McCarthy writes the fatigue, the caring of the father and the child, the tenderness, the categories of our moral compass shifted and some holding on to a course of goodness. The long Walk, the Trail of Tears, the Concentration camps all are precursors to the horrors that the pilgrims over the blackened roads of America have seen. Barren burned silence reigns. And the smallest incident is time and again a deep moral choice on how to survive without loosing the goodness in this world. It is a bleak but not hopeless future vision, a haunting, compelling read which makes me look at the world again, because in some regions this harrowing trek is already going on. Think Darfur, think East Congo… The Road is a masterpiece, read it in Borrowed time and a borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (page 138)
Other quotes: P168: Being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales were suspect. He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.
P179: People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.