I recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road. In this most confronting of stories, the world has been devastated by an unnamed catastrophe and few survive.
Those who have survived often live as cannibals, preying brutally on other unwary survivors.
The tale revolves round an unnamed man and his son as they journey towards the sea in hope of finding a less harsh and possibly safer environment for the boy.
I don’t know much about the author, and at first glance it appears he has written a damning environmental fable, with the human race suffering the deserved effects of their own disregard for the earth.
But on an entirely different level, and perhaps it is accidental, he has written a searing religious parable, a stark meditation on the difficulties of holding on to faith, hope and love in the face of a world where doing so appears inimical to your very survival.
The road is narrow, it is hard and long, and few walk it. The utter depths of abandonment in this post-apocalyptic world approach an actualisation of the ‘dark night of the soul’ described by so many Christian mystics.
The world is dark, grey, covered by ash, it is cold and bitter and ugly.
There is a sense of great dryness and constant thirst, with all running water contaminated.
Rain is merely saturating and chilling; there is no refreshment from it.
There is isolation and fear of the marauding bands of savage survivors. All sense of faith, all hope seems gone; despair and annihilation seem the inevitable outcome.
But the man must go on blindly, one foot in front of the other, hanging on to “the flame”, the kernel of right conduct and the dumb need to look after his son that lies deep within.
He must keep going, not for himself, but for the survival of his child. His wife made her own decision, taking her own life rather than try to keep surviving in such circumstances; but the father somehow cannot forfeit the child’s life by taking a similar decision.
The man’s desire for his son to live sometimes outweighs his desire to do what both he and his son know is right.
In such cases the boy brings him back to remembering why they are still walking – he reminds his father that they are “good guys”.
If the darkness overtakes him and he becomes like those they are hiding from, what is the point?
Thrown into powerful relief by the great savagery and nightmarishness is the immense tenderness between the son and his father.
There is a great, selfless, sacrificial love in the father.
Then, at the last, the father can go on no further; his lungs are haemorrhaging and he dies there on the road, leaving the son terrifyingly bereft.
The boy keeps vigil beside the body for three days, until the arrival of a small family group that they had met earlier.
For a moment one thinks the worst is going to happen and the boy is going to fall grisly victim; but they instead treat the father’s body with dignity and take the son as one of their own. They too are “good guys”.
The unfailing love of the father for the son, his refusal to give in to savagery, his pouring out of himself for his son, and the mercy that is shown the boy in the end – that in a moment justifies all the father’s efforts – are most moving in such an otherwise unrelenting tale.
It renews the whisper of hope that runs as an uneven and sometimes invisible thread through the book, an apparently desperate and forlorn hope, but a hope nevertheless that drives the man to keep going because he must. An obligation greater than he is – the obligation to give his son the best chance for life – urges him on. The immeasurable value of his son’s life is his beacon.
It seemed remarkably apposite approaching Advent, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of The Child in a world where it seems impossible to counter the tide of desolate utilitarian secularism constantly washing over our children; where disregard for the sanctity of human life is endemic; where exploitation and destruction of the weakest and most vulnerable of people – the unborn, the old, the sick – is accepted or even at times lauded in the name of reducing suffering.
It is this Christ Child who as a Man eloquently personified the Christian paradox – and the Christian imperative – as he obediently and willingly poured out His life blood in unspeakable suffering and measureless love to give us life, to save us and offer us hope; who renews the Sacrifice daily on our altars as we are asked to renew the sacrifice daily in our lives.
It is this Christ Child who gives us our reason to go on, who reminds us in the midst of our uphill battle that we are all of value, and that we must believe He will triumph because He has said it and His word is true.
We could well take as our own the thoughts of the nameless man of The Road: “He knew only that (the) child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God, God never spoke.”