A bleak journey with a tin of peaches in a squeaky shopping trolley

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Unless you enjoy testing your mental health to the limits of its endurance, I recommend reading The Road in bright, hopeful daylight, with smells of home cooking floating to your nostrils.

What you shouldn’t do is it read The Road alone, at night, after a break up or whilst staying in a lonely cottage, where the food is running low. Where there’s no Spar and the only humans you’ve seen stand at a distance from you, eyeing you up hungrily. And not in a sexual way.

Every decade gets the dystopian fiction it deserves and The Road is our penance.

Cormac McCarthy brings to a limping sort of life, a heavy world, where a Man and Boy* trudge through a cold, grey land devoid of a biosphere. The language is sparse and tired. The Road is about two impossible human lives, surrounded by dead trees, with nothing but a shopping trolley of tinned peaches and potatoes to survive on.

I want to make a joke about it. Maybe compare it to the empty Sunday shelves at my local village Co-op — nothing left but the moulding melon with the 20p reduced sticker. Or a joke about the holiday season. The locals here run to the shops at 7.30am, breathless and worried, grabbing the bread before the tourists pour in. But you can’t make jokes about The Road. It’s just not appropriate. You’ll know what I mean when you’ve read it. When you’re rocking in the corner of the living room, asking your partner for reassurance that they would never eat the dog, no matter how empty the Co-op’s shelves.

The thing about food in The Road, it’s not so much that’s it’s hard to find. It is. But also that you might become the food. There are some scenes, that in the words of The Man,* “Once seen, stay in your mind forever.” Let’s just say I find it hard to look at glass cake domes since reading the Road. Paris style patisseries are forever ruined.

*The characters don’t have names. I mean, what’s the point!

What you have to cling to in The Road as you travel with The Man and The Boy against the forces of darkness, is the one food scene that allows you a peek of hope and humanity. A crack of light through the dark boards of a nailed up door that has you trapped.

The best, most hopeful, food scene is like this:

You need to sit in a dark bunker, lined with unlabelled tins of food, and convince your terrified child that the previous inhabitants are dead and wont be back. Then you take the tins of food from the shelves — which turn out to be potatoes, rice pudding, condensed milk — and open them with a rusty knife. Heat them over a small stove, lit with your shaking hands, using some of your precious, limited supply of matches. Be sure to keep your gun close though, in case someone finds you and tries to either steal your food, or steal YOU for food. Then heat some water and have your first bath for a year.

The thing is, the unanswered question for me is this: would people really kill and eat each other at the end of civilisation? I’m not so sure. My partner, who works in disasters (it’s ok, he doesn’t create disasters- he’s not a commodities trader or head of BP or anything) reckons that even when people are starving and dying, they don’t tend to resort to cannibalism that often. Hold on to that scraping of a hope as you read The Road.

The Road diet:

Breakfast — some filthy snow and a cup of water from a thin, dead stream

Lunch — don’t be stupid, just keep moving.

Dinner — there’s no discernible dinner time, but when you’re about to get rickets, then stop and make a small fire from some dead trees and heat up some tinned potatoes or beans. Follow it with some tinned prunes or peaches or pears. If you’re lucky.

This is the diet of the good guys.

There are others.

Breakfast/lunch/dinner — hack the limbs from people that you keep in a dark basement and bbq them over an open fire with no added sauce. Alternatively, you can substitute the main ingredient for stray dog.

Originally published at cookingethebooks.tumblr.com.