Great Book Reviewed Here (It's about time)

(For some reason, today Blogger is not allowing any special formatting such as italics. Ergo, no italics.)

So Friday night, January 29, saw the semi-rare occurrence of the moon reaching its perigee the same time it’s full. Result: brightest moon of the year (the January full moon is called the wolf moon – strange but true…..)

Our niece Britta was born under that full moon, and will, undoubtedly, walk under many full moons almost as bright as herself.

It’s been good, the last few days, to see the moon and the sunrise at the bus stop. It seems like it had been cloudy for a month. Sunrise always has surprising colors.

And it’s pure coincidence that all this happened just as I was finishing Cormac McCarthhy’s The Road. The story of a child in a devastated environment, where the moon is not seen and the sun is little more than a rumor and a memory – it “circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp”.

There has been some catastrophe, unnamed, that has left the world lifeless except for a few surviving humans who have to compete for whatever old canned goods they can find, however questionable the quality of what’s in the cans. Snow falls and turns dirty immediately: the atmosphere is ashy, the sky forever gray.

The boy and his father, both nameless, travel through this hell, on foot, pushing a cart with their vital belongings, tarps and blankets and whatever food they’ve found and saved, traveling to the ocean. Why? I imagine because it’s there, and it’s the ocean. “We got to go”. The Man repeats over and over. “We can’t stay here.” So, to the ocean.

That’s not their only concern. The concern of the few humans left is their own survival, and they’ve, most of them, turned to murder and cannibalism.

The Man and the Boy, though, want to survive on more noble terms. The Boy keeps asking, and the Man keeps reassuring him: “We’re the good guys, right?” and “We’re carrying the fire, right?”

This is the point, I think. The Boy wants to do good, wants to be compassionate. The father can’t allow that in this environment; interaction of any kind could be their doom. But the father knows it’s important, knows that the Boy’s compassion and love have to be kept alive; and, in the end, that’s all there is, all that matters. The catastrophe has exposed our race: “The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night . . .(He) read old newspapers while the boy slept. The curious news. The quaint concerns.”

The starkness of the writing brings this all into incredibly sharp focus. There are no chapters, only occasional double spacing between paragraphs. There are no diversions into philosophy, only a grim account of every step, every morsel of food eaten, every dream resented.

The language and writing forms are whittled down, the setting is stripped bare, the supporting cast is mostly is shadow; and the result is a clear, sharp focus on the emotional bond of these two people, for there is nothing else but their love, their need and struggle to preserve goodness, the precariousness of the survival of Hope and Compassion.

The Road, for me, was almost impossible to read because the danger was so stark, so immediate on every page. And yet I had to keep reading for that very reason – I couldn’t stop there, I had to move on, I had to find a better place. I had to know the good guys were still good, the fire was safe for another day.

Brilliant.

(I’m happy that it’s getting easier for me to compile a “favorite” list; I’m discovering about one a year, it seems: To Kill A Mockingbird, Madame Bovary, The Bell Jar, and now The Road. One more for a Top 5 Bus Book List).