Spoiler alert

I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Cam suggested I read it because it is "a wonderful book." He asked me how I liked it when I was on page 16 and I said it was quite cheerful. He said there were even more cheerful moments ahead. Quite a few of them.

This was the first book I've read by Mr. McCarthy but I did see No Country for Old Men (and if you read my column you know I loved it) so I know that he's not exactly kind to his characters. I ended up reading all night long, finishing around five am this morning. And yes, I had work today. And I had to get Cam up for school at six so not a lot of sleep today.

The book was extremely grim and I kept worrying it was going to get even more grim. I had a sort of low grade anxiety attack the entire time I was reading, with my stomach churning and my heart racing.

I've read loads of post apocolyptic stories and never been quite that worried. Swan Song was one I quite liked, as was the Postman (not the film, the novel.) I think it's because no matter how bad things were in the other stories there was always something to eat somewhere. In The Road there just isn't anything growing at all. There aren't even any insects, so far as I could tell. Which brings me to some complaints about biology.

There's a horrific scene where the two nameless protagonists scare off a small group of people who leave their food cooking on a spit. The food is a human infant. This is one of the moments that cause permenent damage to the spirit of the young boy who is one of the protagonists. The impression I got was that they infant was the child of a woman who passed them shortly before, only she was pregnant then. There's another scene where they break into a house and find a whole bunch of people who are being kept as a food source.

But, and here I'm speaking only from a biological point of view, it doesn't make any sense to keep people so you can eat them. And it surely doesn't make sense to have a baby so you can eat it. The caloric expenditure involved in growing the fetus to term is significantly larger than whatever you would get from the newborn. And as far as the other people go, my understanding is that it takes seven pounds of vegetable matter to create one pound of flesh. So you can feed x number of people from one cow or you can feed 7x people by skipping the cow and having everyone eat vegetarian.

What are these people in the human larder eating? If all there is to eat is other people then by keeping them alive you're wasting the majority of the calories. if there is other stuff to eat then why are you eating them?

Those are the kinds of thoughts that kept interfering while I was reading the book. But in the end I think it may have just been a kind of self defense. When I'm concentrating on how the book doesn't work then I'm not as involved emotionally. Perhaps I simply can't bear the idea of anyone eating a newborn baby so I have to make it unlikely.

Even with all my protective mechanisms in place I couldn't stop crying when the book ended. It's terribly bleak and sad.

When the movie comes out next year I think I'll stay home and wash my hair instead.