The Road

An excellent English Literature teacher at my school sometimes gives me a tip for a good read, especially near the start of a holiday. Her latest recommendation was The Road by Cormac Mc Carthy and I was not disappointed with her suggestion, polishing it off in virtually one sitting during the half-term break. This winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007 tells a story of Biblical proportions about a father and son who have survived some unspecified cataclysmic event that has reduced America and possibly most of the world to little more than dust and ashes. We soon discover that within this shrivelled landscape, human society has been stripped of any veneer of civilization and thus sinister gangs of cannibals roam the scorched woods and wasted cities. The freezing winter is beginning to bite, and father and son must move south to the sea to have any chance of survival. Their life on the road becomes a primal quest for food, shelter, and personal safety, though beyond this they both hunger for hope and search for meaning to sustain them. The boy constantly seeks for reassurance that they will ultimately be met by goodness, and tries to internalize the mantra his father has taught him that they must ‘carry the fire.’ On this level, the story is universal, but it has touched a particular nerve today as the notion of a ruined earth, either through nuclear annihilation or global warming, increasingly haunts us. Indeed British environmental campaigner, George Monbiot was so struck by the book that he declared that Cormac Mc Carthy was one of fifty people who could yet, save the planet. He went onto praise the book with words which affirm the power of the arts to transform our society:

“It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world."

It has now been released as a feature film, which will hopefully ensure that Mc Carthy’s dystopian vision challenges a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic, although inevitably much of the savage beauty of the writer’s prose will inevitably be lost in the screen version. Disturbing images have become such common currency for most of us today in our media culture that perhaps we need more than ever the power of language to open our eyes to see the world afresh and shake us out of our complacency. I wonder if any cinematic shot will evoke the horror of post-acopaclyptic cities and their inhabitants quite like this description:

“The long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk….The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bog-folk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.”

Global Warming and the environment is the burning (sorry!) issue of the day and thankfully, the Church has begun to speak urgently about the problem along with many others. Archbishop Rowan Williams has surely one of the more resonant voices for this and many other contemporary debates and he spoke powerfully at a lecture in Southwark Cathedral recently. Like Mc McCarthy, Williams sees the connection between the gradual destruction of our planet and the increasing degradation of our humanity, but rather than pressing the panic button he urges us to consider what we have lost in our reckless plundering of the earth’s resources and how we can work to restore it:

“Many of the things which have moved us to towards ecological disaster have been distortions in our sense of who and what we are, and their overall effect has been to isolate us more and more from the reality we are part of. Our response to the crisis needs to be a reality check, a rediscovery of our responsibility for the material world. And this is why the apparently small scale action that changes personal habits and local possibilities is so crucial”

I’m sure Williams is right but as Monbiot has implied it may take the artist in the first instance, rather than the campaigners or clergy, to galvanize us to make that change.