![]() ![]() Dear Esther is set on an uninhabited island on the Scottish Hebridean coast. In Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the residents of this English country town seem to have not just died but vanished in a cloud of light. Country fields, vacant houses, desolate space stations, deserted islands, abandoned towns. I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s noticed how many walking simulators are set in empty places. There are no dates or time frames to tell us how far in the future this is happening - but do you really need that? None of the cities or landmarks our characters pass through are named - but what would that have added? Even more brazenly, the catastrophe that destroyed the world is left obscure, the details withheld - but is all that important to this story, about a man and a boy surviving in the ashes of humanity?Īnd, the biggest question of all: Are you able to appreciate the stark beauty that’s left behind when all the static is filtered out of a narrative, when all the comfort of the familiar is ripped away and what’s left is the pure solid core of a story? One of the things that makes The Road such a fascinating book is that it explores this question: how much of a story can the author strip away while still leaving behind a meaningful narrative? And in amongst the bare bones of this story, there lies a challenge to the reader: how much of your expectations are you willing to strip away? The Road is a bold invitation to question everything you thought was essential in a post-apocalyptic story. He walked out on the beach to the edge of the light and stood with his clenched fists on top of his skull and fell to his knees sobbing in rage. He held the boy and bent to hear the labored suck of air. He woke endlessly and sat and slapped himself or rose to put wood on the fire. He tried to stay awake all night but he could not. And you don’t need much internal monologue, not when the characters’ actions tell you everything. The dialogue is clear without punctuation. Names are unnecessary when there are only two characters. How the scarcity of the prose reflects that ruined, empty landscape, that sparse canvas amplifying every little thing that happens on it - every motion in the distance, every snatch of conversation, every log added to the ever-dwindling fire, every small act of love between father and son.Īnd then, the slow realisation that you don’t even need any of the things that you were so shocked to see were missing. The way the gaps and cracks between bits of dialogue speak volumes in and of themselves. It’s like McCarthy decided to take a novel and jettison everything he could while still keeping the sequence of events cohesive and the grammar coherent.Īnd it’s this unflinching commitment to emptiness that makes reading The Road an utterly mesmerising experience, because what unfolds in between the stillness of its pages is remarkable. ![]() It doesn’t have chapters, it shuns quotation marks and other punctuation. There’s almost no internal monologue most of the time we infer what the characters are thinking or feeling by what they do and say, and they don’t say much. They have very few encounters with other people. The protagonists, the man and the boy, are never named. Events are described straightforwardly, with little elaboration. The prose is ruthlessly stark, at times even simplistic. What makes The Road entirely unlike other post-apocalyptic novels, is what it chooses to leave out. But it’s how McCarthy tells his story that sets it apart. We’ve seen it all before, a million times. All the basic elements are here: a cataclysm, a blasted landscape, empty cities, burned-out cars, other survivors both benign and ghastly, a man trying to protect his family. In some ways, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is like any other post-apocalyptic story. They scavenge houses and watch for danger and say little to each other as they head south to escape the worsening winter that may soon consume the entire world. We’ll be all right.Ī man and a boy push a shopping cart across a dead and blackened American landscape. He held the boy against him, cold to the bone. Houses or barns or under the bank of a roadside ditch with the blankets pulled over their heads and the noon sky black as the cellars of hell. They were crossing the broad coastal plain where the secular winds drove them in howling clouds of ash to find shelter where they could. Cowled in their blankets against the cold and their breath smoking, shuffling through the black and silky drifts. They plodded on, thin and filthy as street addicts. This is the transcript of a Youtube video, which can be viewed here:
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