But not any more, not after this grim soul-searing tale by Cormac McCarthy.
It has been several years since civilization has come to an end -- a nuclear conflagration is hinted at. A man and his young son are following a road south to escape the coming winter. The boy was born at the same time as the cataclysm and the only world he knows is covered in ash. The sea is no longer blue. Everything has been ransacked, and the few remaining people are starving.
This is not the clean homespun world of The Postman. Even Oryx and Crake seems bright and hopeful by comparison. The man and his son are street people in a fallen land, carrying their meagre belongings in a shopping cart. It is not an adventure. It is a grinding filthy miserable existence, fraught by growing fear and dread.
To keep themselves going, they repeat a couple of mantra-like phrases. One is that they are the "good guys." The other is that they are "carrying the fire" -- the last hope for any human values worth preserving. What they are pitted against is described in a dream on the first page of the book. In a cave by a
black and ancient lake, a creature raises its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.
The creature represents a universe inimical to humans, and includes those people in whom the spark of humanity has been extinguished. The man and the boy are struggling to remain not only alive, but human. The man is Prometheus, his son the faint flame of his conscience, constantly pleading for compassion toward others.
The book is short, has no chapters, and can easily be read in one or two sittings. It is mesmerizing in its biblical intensity. It won the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2007 Pullitzer Prize. The Nobel is next.
