The Road

The book is compelling because McCarthy paints such a realistic scenario for the end of the world. The book starts six or eight years after something awful and irrevocable has put the world in decline and its immediately clear that things won't be getting better any time soon. No one in the book even knows for sure what the event was. Whether it was nuclear holocaust, massive volcanic explosion, or a meteor impact that burned the cities to the ground and poisoned the air doesn't really even matter. It's all ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

The unnamed protagonist is walking down the road with his son and he's pushing a shopping cart--that symbol of modern surplus and convenience--filled with whatever they can scavange. They are moving south because the planet is getting steadily colder due to a permanent haze that's blocked out most of the sun. Most everything--people, animals, and plants--is dead. The man and the boy must contend with occasional marauders and zombie-like survivors, but it is the creeping death of starvation, dehydration, disease and exposure that hunts them continually through the novel.

At one point, the man finds some withered, leathery apples half buried under the ashes of a former orchard. He carefully collects them all and shares them with the boy. If the biblical book of Genesis is the first chapter of the world, this scene could have stood as its last chapter: two humans gnawing on the fallen fruit of the tree of no more knowledge.

This book is a tough read because there is so little hope to be found. It's a good read because, through it all, the reader must question why they are on the road. The protagonist doesn't know where they're going or what they'll find when they get there, but he's driven by something beyond the pure animal will to survive.