Readers of The Road, what do you think the nature of the catastrophe was?
I can’t imagine anything that could do to the earth what the book describes.
(And yeah I know it’s fiction and largely unimportant what has made the world this way but I’m still curious).
It’s fiction and nothing could do to the earth what the book describes.
Whatever happened was there solely because McCarthy wanted to make a point of it, not for any rational reason.
Now I’m curious.
I thought, based on the scene wherein he describes hearing a boom, and then going to fill up the tub, as well as the nature of the fathers illness, which closely resembles Radiation Poisoning, that the world had burned to ash by a massive nuclear exchange.
It’s possible I’m on crack, however.
I thought nuclear as well. Exapno, why can’t it be nuclear?
I agree, it seemed to be a nuclear holocaust to me.
The discovery of the fully equipped bomb shelter seemed to further confirm this for me (thematically, not necessarily logically).
a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions…a dull rose glow in the windowglass
What a book!
Just finished it last night, beautiful book.
All the nuclear bombs in the world exploding would not devastate the enormous swatches of land far away from cities devastated that the book would require. You’d get a series of small concentric blast areas that would be insignificant compared to the total area of the U.S. Nobody even at the height of the Cold War believed that a full-out war could destroy the country or the world. That was for fiction writers only.
It’s a parable. It’s not supposed to be rational.
Is it in the same kind of overwrought, metaphor-encrusted prose style that’s kept me from enjoying his work in the past?
First paragraph:
Then it gets worse.
He should be beaten to death with cacti.
I don’t think it is at all fair to suggest the first paragraph is in any way representative of the majority of the book, exapno. That paragraph is a dream - similar scenes make up maybe 5% of the book at most. (Tho I admit that bit about the “dull glass bell” had me confounded for a while before i just decided to ignore it.)
All in all I thought The Road was pretty compelling and forthright storytelling - at least by CMc terms. Certainly lacked the dense indecipherable passages from Suttree. And was far more of a story than Blood Meridian which was little more of a recitation of the horrors men inflicted on men (tho the baby on a spit was reminiscent - and predictable…) Personally, ATPH is his book that I enjoyed most, with Orchard Keeper second. Didn’t care at all for the 2d 2 of the border trilogy. Wasn’t too impressed by No Country either, other than the impressive body count. Should make a bang up movie!
I also imagined nuclear holocaust, tho admittedly of an extreme degree. I thought the ending of The Road a bit of a cop out. But the complete bleakness kept me from being entirely engaged. I mean how could there be any chance of anyone surviving in the long run, when there was not a single plant or animal alive anywhere, other than a few humans?
I also was a little - um - disappointed with the relative ease with which the main characters found all their supplies. The bomb shelter, the mansion, and the ship were 3 huge sources of supplies that no one else had managed to find?
All in all a worthwhile quick read. I can’t imagine the typical reader of Oprah book selections would be thrilled with it tho.
It was a MacGuffin Bomb what destroyed the world.
The true earth-destroying nuclear holocaust may be fictional, but that doesn’t make the book a parable nor does it make the book irrational. It’s not a parable, it’s a pretty straight-forward post-apocalyptic journey tale and it’s perfectly rational given the fictional world it is set in. I liked it, as much as I ever like books that bum me out.
“Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”
Feh.
There is no rational scenario that would result in this world. None.
Jodi, I don’t understand your objection to the word parable. I’m not using it in a religious sense. The Road fits under any number of the definitions of the word that can be found here.
McCarthy is creating a non-world to simplify the moral environment of his characters. There is nothing wrong - or new - in doing so. His characters are no more perfectly rational than the characters in Alice in Wonderland. They exist merely to illustrate the points he wanted to make, unconstrained by the limitations that novels set in our supposed reality place upon their characters. His father and son are devices moving through a Device. Again, there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad about this, although it is an inherently difficult accomplishment, as the dozens of Alice imitators have discovered to their peril.
I don’t know what else to properly call The Road except a parable. Whatever it may be, however, rational is not one of the options.
I do kind of wish there had been some sense of hope, no matter how grim their short term outlook was to be. In some ways McCarthy could have made a more gruesome world but one that offered more to the protagonists.
I thought it was a nuclear holocaust followed by a nuclear winter–that is, a pall of clouds covered the earth that drastically reduced both sunlight and temperature until the vegetation all died.
I really enjoyed the book, but I really like overwrought prose of the sort that McCarthy writes. And I think that, had there been any hope at all, the book would have been a lot weaker: as it is, it’s a great story about humans stubbornly struggling to survive when the effort is clearly futile.
Daniel
Yup!
I read it entirely as a parable. As a parable, I don’t enjoy it, but it does its job. As straight post-apocalyptic fiction, science fiction writers do a better job.
I disagree, about the overwrought prose. I haven’t read all of McCarthy’s books (just the Border Trilogy), but I thought the style of The Road was comparatively simple and clear.