This is by Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023). It was published in 2006, and won a Pulitzer Prize the following year.

It features on a Five Books list of "best apocalyptic fiction". But I bought it purely because it was there on the bookshelf in The Hanger, Alfreton, Derbyshire (where you get four books for GBP 1.50).

It's a bleak, powerful read, and I have no doubt that it will stay with me for a long time.

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Night dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world."

Thus we begin...

We're following the journey of an unnamed father and his son (maybe 8-10 years old). Most living things on the planet have been wiped out by an unspecified global catastrophe that took place just before the boy's birth. Forced to wring sustenance from this black, ashy world, they're moving south because they won't survive another winter in the north.

The landscape is desolate, the built environment ruined. The dust and soot force people -- the few people who are still left -- to wear masks and goggles. So much ash... "Howling clouds" of it: "The country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk."


Iceland, 1989. It's probably unfair to use pictures of this beautiful country to illustrate a post on global meltdown. But some have speculated that the cataclysm McCarthy refers to might have been the eruption of a super-volcano (other hypotheses are asteroid impact or nuclear exchange)

Our father and son regularly encounter corpses. Many corpses. And from the living there's little brotherly kindness on offer. Since everything -- everything -- is in short supply, nowhere is safe. They several times have to flee marauding groups; they have seen evidence of cannibalism. So their lives consist of scavenging, improvising, hiding, and moving on. Once, when directly threatened, the man kills their assailant, right in front of the child's eyes.

He warns his son: "It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you."

Which is confusing to the sense of good and bad that he has instilled in the boy:

"Are we still the good guys? he said
"Yes. We're still the good guys.
"And we always will be.
"Yes. We always will be."

They are the ones, the man tells his son, who are "carrying the fire".

Sometimes the grimness is alleviated by a serendipitous find. A food cache that no-one has rifled yet. A place to bathe. A building to shelter in. The opportunity to swap their filthy clothes for better ones.

But mostly, it's a life on the move. Dad's constant refrain: We have to go. We have to move. We have to run.

It's definitely suspenseful. There's danger everywhere. They're always exhausted, always afraid, always dirty, always hungry, sometimes ill. They stare death in the face. Starvation is sometimes only a few days away. They can trust no-one.

As a reader, you're tense all the time.



***

Any good novel forces you to ask yourself what YOU would have done... The man clings to hope, refuses to give up, remembers his strokes of luck, counts on there being more of them. (Interestingly, McCormac describes himself as one of the luckiest people he's ever known, often experiencing strokes of good fortune exactly when he needed them.)

But the protagonist's wife committed suicide shortly after the cataclysm. The man had tried to encourage her to stay alive:

"We're survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp.
"Survivors? she said.
"Yes.
"What in God's name are you talking about? We're not survivors. We're the walking dead in a horror film."

She sees no hope. She sees only the threat of violence and a violent death. She prefers to pre-empt that: "You'd rather wait for it to happen. But I cant. I cant." Her only hope is for "eternal nothingness". In those circumstances, I can understand that...

Now, all the man's friends are dead, too, and sometimes even the little boy sees no hope, and wishes he were with his mother. The man tells him he mustn't say that. It's a bad thing to say. What the good guys do, he says, is keep trying. They don't give up...



How does he sustain his hope, his determination to carry on? Well, in amongst the details of their prosaic struggle to live, there's a tantalizing something -- a tinge, never in your face -- of the mythical and mystical. At one point, the man muses: "He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."

The boy is compassionate, always wanting to help any stray person they come across. Dad, practical, usually rejects these requests. When they encounter suffering, he's sorry, but knows he can't fix it. For the boy, this is confusing: "In the stories we're always helping people and we don't help people." (And at one point, the punishment the father metes out to someone who has tried to steal their stuff is almost certain to cause his death.)

They encounter Ely, the only character in the book to be named. Is he an Elijah-figure, returned to announce the coming of Messiah? Later, there is a curious exchange where the father says to his son: "You're not the one who has to worry about everything," and the boy looks up, and says: "Yes I am... I am the one."

Whether McCarthy endorses his character's view is much less clear. Ely, after all, is categoric: "There is no God and we are his prophets."



***

You become very invested in these two vulnerable humans, whose relationship is so perfectly rendered in the simple dialogue. You hold your breath when they face danger, and release it when they catch the occasional break. But you know the writing is on the wall. The man has been coughing ever since we met him. He finds it difficult to recover from a leg wound he copped during an attack.

And there's going to be no miracle. He dies.

Except there is a miracle... Because a family that has already become aware of this lone pair of travellers offers to take the boy in.

Now, we don't know for sure, because we've not been impressed by the humans we've seen so far, but we get the impression they're good-hearted folks, who are not going to eat their children at some future date.

Sometimes the woman talks to the boy about God, but the boy finds his late father to be an easier interlocutor: "He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn't forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time."

It's just a touch of the transcendant. Nothing is laboured, or made explicit. But you wonder whether the man was indeed the deliverer, the protector, of some sort of hope in the world, and he could lay down his burden because someone else was there to take it up. (There's more on this whole dimension here, although I feel the text is less categoric than the article.)

This is the final paragraph:

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

Is there any hope in these last lines? This whole disaster can't be "made right again". But is there something deep in the earth whose ancient mystery might herald something new?



***

The writing, while stark, is exceptionally beautiful, the cadences perfectly controlled. Examples:

-- Standing on the shoes of a bleak sea, they wonder if another father and son "slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rages lost to the same indifferent sun".

-- "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

-- Towards the end we have this: "The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels siting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black."

Shivery, all of it.



***

This was not what you would call an enjoyable book. It's way too devastating for that label. But it's memorable. Very, very memorable.