Cormac McCarthy’s bleak road

By Robert Macfarlane

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whisper. A man shivers under a tarpaulin in a forest, murmuring a bedtime story to his young son to keep the darkness at bay. The landscape around them has been charred by a fire of unspecified origin and unknowable extent. Nothing natural has survived the scorching. The trees are leafless, the sky birdless, the streams lifeless. Ash blows in swirls over the blacktop of the roads. Colour is abolished, the earth reduced to its residues. Through the vast dead wilderness trek the man and his boy, day after day, pushing their belongings in a shopping trolley. At night they lie up among the pines, while their strength dwindles and their hope shrivels.

Until Cormac McCarthy’s novel "The Road" (2006), apocalypse had always seemed a baroque affair, lavish in its melodramas of asteroid strike, nuclear blast and tidal wave; populated by petrolheads in rabbit-skin loincloths and black leather dog-collars. McCarthy stole apocalypse’s thunder, and produced something far more terrible because more tentative. He saw that apocalypse is about aftermath rather than grand finale. He knew that the one thing more terrifying than dying in a global catastrophe is surviving it. The disaster is over and done with in a single sentence: "A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions." What follows is the desperate business of endurance.