Welcome to the Apocalypse

The Road

So, I'm in the middle of Cormac McCarthy's recent Pulitzer-prize-winning The Road and I have to say, I'm. On. That. Road.  What a whopper of a novel.  A father and his son walk across post-apocalyptic American and jeez, I'm there, the whole way.  Lesser novelists, I think, would get stuck with how to make a novel about a journey through a barren wasteland dramatic enough to hold a reader.  How does he do it?  Language.  It all comes down to language.  Take these couple sentences for instance:

    Dark of the invisible moon.  The nights now only slightly less black.  By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp. (32)

What a great image.  Tight, minimalist.  McCarthy tells the whole story in a series of these short fragments of their journey and the cumulative effect is one of urgency.  You just can't wait to get to the end of THE ROAD.

Enough praise.  What I'd also like to talk about is the proliferation of novels about post-apocalyptic America that have come out recently.  The Road, although probably the most high-profile, is only one of them.  There's also Jim Crace's The Pest House and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. There are others, I'm sure.  But it makes one wonder: what's the deal about the end of the world?  I also recently read Omnidawn's recent Paraspheres anthology and several of the stories were apocalyptic.  Maybe I've just hit an apocalyptic vein, but it seems more than just a coincidence.  Do these novelists know something?  Are they preying on post 9/11 fear?  Why is apocalypse selling books?  Do you see creative work about the end of the world coming from other sources as well?  Thoughts...

Comments

[Emmi]

Well, what an interesting point. Maybe it's a much bigger point, like that Americans have become kind of overly theatrical and thrive on dramas like 9/11. For others like Mitt Romney it's an excuse to wiretap mosques.

I think that climate change can set off the same reaction although I find irony in the fact that the radical right wants to deny evolution et al yet global warming offers all the plague, locusts and floods that any bible-lover could ever want.

Anyway I'm ranting, sorry. It's late. I must check out those books, they look cool.....

[Brian Freeze]

Great book!  I loved it!  The image is haunting of the man, the boy and the shopping cart in a blackened desert of land and conscience.  Sadly there are places where this scenario is a reality.  The book is a warning of the short step to anarchy even for the high income countries.  Our growing global interdependence can either shape us to apocalyptic doom or millennial prosperity.  Jeffery Sachs in "The End of Poverty" proffers the latter.  Even if the former happens, McCarthy holds out the promise that good will survive.

[Laura]

What was all the hype about.