The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
MacMillan, HK$165
Cormac McCarthy's characters have trudged the Earth from the 1840s to the near-present, struggling to follow the tracks of America's past, understand its present and survive for a future. In his 10th novel, the austerity of his prose finds its ideal setting in a 'cauterised terrain' after the apocalypse. An unnamed man and his young son are 'treading the world under like rats on a wheel' for hundreds of wintry kilometres as they head to the US coast in search of a sustainable life. Almost all flora and fauna have been obliterated by a catastrophe that's never explained. Ash covers the ground and the sky. Dead trees fall in the night. The few remaining humans eat each other or fossick for man-made food.
Born at the time of the apocalypse, the boy has seen a baby's body roasting on a spit. He needs his father to survive and to teach him how to be human. He urges his father to show morality and compassion for invalids they pass on the road, but he's terrified of sleeping in man-made structures, which he associates with human abattoirs.
The man struggles with the anguish of showing his son how to kill himself if he's caught by cannibals. He girds himself to pull the trigger on the boy if he must, and is haunted by thoughts of the wife who committed suicide rather than face the lost world. A part of him 'always wished it to be over'.