Tammy lent me another book recently: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It was Tammy's first foray into post-apocalyptic fiction, I believe, and so she was understandably quite impressed by what it presented and figured that I'd enjoy it, too.
I have to admit that, as I reached the halfway mark of the story, I hadn't really read anything that spoke to me all that much. It's told in a very fragmented, simplistic style, with lots of sentences that aren't (sentences, that is). It has the expected gloomy scenes of the two main characters (father and son, apparently) scrounging for food and shelter in a hellish America shortly after something unspecified has wiped out most human and animal life. There's the obligatory encounter with cannibals who waylay anyone foolish enough to come within their territory, and just day after day after day of miserable existence. It's interesting enough that I want to follow it through to the end, but I haven't found it to be as personally engrossing as, say, On The Beach by Nevil Shute, or as edgy as Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog.
Having said that, though, I recently read a section that absolutely sent shivers through me and brought tears to my eyes. The forlorn pair, on the verge of starvation, happen upon a bomb shelter buried within the yard of a long-abandoned house. Within it, they miraculously find shelf upon shelf of preserved foods in varieties that the boy doesn't even have the vocabulary to name! As they settle in for a short period of salvation, and are about to eat their first real meal in perhaps years, we get the following exchange:
[Man:] Do you feel okay?
[Boy:] Yes.
[Man:] What is it?
[Boy:] Do you think we should thank the people?
[Man:] The people?
[Boy:] The people who gave us all this.
[Man:] Well. Yes, I guess we could do that.
[Boy:] Will you do it?
[Man:] Why don't you?
[Boy:] I don't know how.
[Man:] Yes you do. You know how to say thank you.
The boy sat staring at his plate. He seemed lost. The man was about to speak when he said:
[Boy:] Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldn't eat it no matter how hungry we were and we're sorry that you didn't get to eat it and we hope that you're safe in heaven with God.
He looked up.
[Boy:] Is that okay?
[Man:] Yes. I think that's okay.
Yeah, now that's a pretty moving scene that I won't forget anytime soon. Thanks, Tammy!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I remember there being a few scenes like that one that really touched me. Not sure where they were in the chronology of the book, so you may or may not have run across them yet.
There's also a passage at the very beginning, perhaps 2nd or 3rd page, that describes a dream the man had about a blind monster in a cave. I found it vivid and haunting ... so much so that I went back and re-read it many times over the course of finishing the book.
It was those scenes and the whole relationship between the father and son that I consider to be the value in (and the point of) the book, not the actual post-apocalyptic events.
Don't forget this is the author who wrote No Country for Old Men, so I'm really not sure if you'd like that movie or not.
Anyways I'm very glad that you at least got something out of this recommendation! Hopefully through trial and error I'll eventually figure out what you'll like!
Post a Comment