This Pulitzer Prize winning novel may indeed be the bleakest thing I'll ever read... Certainly there is no doubting the extraordinary evocative power of this book. It draws you wholly and unrelentingly into its nightmarish post-apocalyptic world, which, though never made explicit as such, appears to be the nuclear winter following an atomic war. This is a world without a sun, without colour, without life beyond the few human remnants of a civilisation which has destroyed itself. The world has been ravaged by fire, the air constantly bears grey ash which mixes with frequent snow and covers everything. No animals, no plants (except at one point for some miraculous morel mushrooms), so no food beyond that which can still be scavenged from the old world, in the form of canned produce, a constantly depleting resource.
A Mad Max style romp this ain't, so, other than to show us the possible consequences if our (self-) destructive folly (a job it incidentally does extremely well), why on earth write this book?
I'm not sure I have the answer to that question, but it can only lie in the story of human fortitude and devotion which is its centrepiece. The novel tracks the progress of a father and son, known to us only as the man and the boy, who are travelling southwards though this wasteland in the hope of reaching the sea, in the hope that something might be better there, even that, as a father who is a remnant of the old world, tells his son, who was born into this new one, "the sea will be blue". The two travel along roads though a blighted landscape, pushing a supermarket cart with whatever scavenged food and supplies they manage to accumulate, passing the nights in hiding places under a tarp, trying to keep the cold and the weather at bay.
Other people, for all that the man assures the boy that there are other "good guys" out there, are a constant threat and danger. We don't immediately realise the full extent of why, until the unrelenting logic of this world becomes clear - in a world without animal or plant life, food can only come from two sources: the dwindling leftovers of a dead civilisation or the weaker human survivors inhabiting the new.
The man and the boy reject this logic. Indeed, as the man frequently tells the boy: "we keep the fire". The man's raison d'être, his sole bulwark against despair, is to keep the boy safe, out of the hands of the bedraggled cannibals who prey on the weak. He will go to great lengths to do this, ready to kill and refuse help to the helpless to achieve this. There is a strong moral tone in the story to man and boy, a feeling even that this boy could be some kind of saviour for mankind - the man even says at one point that God gave him the job of protecting the boy - but the morality is far from an easy or glib one, as we see when the man's actions, over the complaints of the boy, in effect condemn a less "fortunate" traveller to death.
Is there any hope in this book? Rationally, it is hard to see any. The sea, when it is finally reached, is not blue. The moments of miraculous respite (such as discovering an unused back-yard nuclear bunker stocked with food) are only ever that, a brief respite. In the long run, this blighted world can only be a coda to the story of human (or any?) life on earth. Surely? And yet, there remains that quasi-religious idea that hope remains alive as long as one man (or boy) remains alive to "keep the fire". The "pass it on" conclusion to the book, does nothing to increase our logical hopes, but might just keep some faith alive.
Reading all this, I can see this novel may appear some macho survivalist fantasy. Believe me, it is not. This is the real thing, a substantial literary achievement, where also where language means something, where shades of Shakespeare and Beckett mingle with a modern American idiom to produce something of genuine poetic power. Overall, in literary terms, what this brings to mind most is perhaps Albert Camus' The Plague in a kind of terse Anglo-Saxon version. It is never quite clear why, but for the good man, "il faut lutter", regardless of whether any ultimately good outcome can be expected. So, though it did at some moments even annoy me ("why are you inflicting this hopelessness on me?") at the same time there is no denying that this is a book to make you think. Moreover, it will stay in your imagination perhaps indefinitely.
Recommendation? If this hasn't put you off, read it. If it has, I guess it's not for you.
Bleak hope?
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