The worst has happened. What is was, we'll never know. McCarthy never says what has happened. All we know is that it was BAD. Bad enough, in fact, to bring civilization as we know it to an end. Ruinous cities and ramshackle ghost towns are inhabited by the last shambles of the America that once was. Appropriately enough, they are predatory cannibals who stalk the roads for prey to rape and kill. Hell, they even devour their own dead. Waste not, want not... yes?
From the rubble of some northern city emerges a man and his son whose names we do not know. Whose names we do not really need to know. The man, broken in health and spirit is the last veteran of the old world. He was there for the transition, he saw day become eternal night. His wife, the mother of his only son, is dead. Now he alone cares for the boy. The sun becomes dimmer, and the skies darken, he and the boy must venture south in search of something... anything more hospitable than this. They do not know what they'll find, if anything, or what they'll face along the way. But they must go. To go means possible death. To stay means certain death. If worse comes to worse, they have two bullets in the chamber. "The Road" strikes me as a book about more than the end of the world. It is more than its post apocalyptic nightmare. The man, ragged and forlorn, must protect his son and instill in him what little of the old ways as he can conjure. With what little they have and with what little they can find, they manage to survive and carry-on. When there is absence, Man makes. In the absence of light, Man makes light. In the absence of warmth, Man kindles fire. In the absence of faith, Man makes it. It is man against a world of absence.
In a world of darkness, man must carry the light. The boy is the light. He is the only hope. His father, like almost any father since the beginning of time, will do anything to protect him and to save him and to teach him. "The Road" in its simple style, gritty as the highway it wanders, is an ode to mankind's ability. The same ability that has driven it since the dawn, now drives it on the edge of night.
