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 PrintableVersion The RoadLooking at secular booksStripping away the facadeTHE ROAD I haven’t read anything like this book for years. Although popular and now made into a film, it had completely passed me by, perhaps because of my taste for history, subtlety and domesticity; The Road is as far removed from that as can possibly be. It is a dystopian view of a post-holocaust world, raw and gut-wrenching, written in striking prose. In the 1980s, the Cold War meant that earnest teenagers read about nuclear destruction. Here, the landscape is the same, but the writing is definitely grown-up. We have a simple scenario: in an ironic play on the road movie genre, a father and son are making their way through burnt -out America to the coast, their few belongings in a supermarket trolley. We never learn their names and neither do we find out what has happened to bring about such environmental and social devastation. Food has all but disappeared and the land is depopulated, apart from bands of roving soldiers and desperate individuals seeking to survive by cannibalism. Every day is a terrifying battle against despair and death in this inversion of the American dream. Against this background, the tenderness between father and son is precious. The dialogue is pared back, but loaded with significance, as they remind themselves that they are the ‘good guys’, and work out how to live rightly. In an ash-covered landscape, their love, hope, patience and gentleness towards each other are all the more extraordinary. A kind of JobMcCarthy’s book is no allegory or moral tract, yet this is a book about faith. The man is a kind of Job who refuses to curse God and die, while he and his son are kept alive by providential provision. At the same time, in the horrors around them, we see a compelling version of hell: goodness has been leeched from the land and people prey on each other, literal and metaphorical darkness has fallen. I commend this book to you because it reminds us of the fragility of our materialist society and unmasks human depravity. I’m going to reread it soon and slowly, to savour the writing and think more seriously about God’s judgment. Sarah Allen,
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