the road (continued)

i'm not sure how much i can trust my statcounter, but it appears that some of you are afraid to click on the imageupdate link (or any link for that matter). therefore, i've decided to include the blurb here. there's a chance that the managing editor of imageupdate may force me to remove it, so read quickly--it may disappear at any moment:

Nothing says “Merry Christmas” quite like Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road. And we mean that. The Road offers a dark, apocalyptic vision of the future, of a charred, useless land, wasted by an unnamed catastrophe and “peopled with refugees [in] masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators.” McCarthy’s characteristically spare dialogue forges a world that is chilling and austere. And into this “crushing black vacuum of the universe” he thrusts a frightened father and son. They push a battered shopping cart south through the ash-choked air, hoping to escape the winter cold, hoping to find food. In this desolation, language and meaning deteriorate, “the names of things slowly following those things into oblivion… the names of things one believed to be true.” The father walks the road with a pistol tucked in his belt—in this savage land, he is no longer free to do right, only to stay alive. But there may be hope in McCarthy’s darkness, perhaps even a sense of the Incarnation, an inkling of Advent. Despite the desperation of their journey, the son walks in empathy. With an innocence foreign to the blighted earth, this boy cares passionately about right and wrong. At times the father “raise[s] his weeping eyes” to see his son “standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.” This child, born into a world gone mad, shines with some greater fire. And that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown (David par. 2).