What is different about this excellent novel compared to
other dystopian novels is that we are given no indication as to what has produced the
dystopian world we are presented with. Other novels such as Margaret Atwood's brilliant
Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood give
a specific root cause of the disintegration of society. In the case of these novels it
is a killer disease that has been unleashed and has decimated humanity. In the case of
Alas, Babylon, it is a nuclear holocaust. Yet in The
Road, no clear indication is given, which means there is no specific warning
about, for example, the dangers of nuclear weapons or the engineering of diseases.
However, what is clear is that now humanity has suffered this collapse, the novel shows
that it has returned to levels of savagery that make the remaining humans resemble
beasts more than human beings. The savage canibalism that humanity has sunk into shows
that the veneer of civlisation is at best skin deep. Consider the inital description of
what happens after the unspecified tragedy:
Creedless shells of men tottering down the
causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old
and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and
night.
The real warning of
this novel then is that however civilised we feel we have become, we are animals at
heart, and, when civilisation is taken away from us, we will act like animals to defend
ourselves and ensure our survival--even if the price is our own
humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment