The End of The Road

Tasmanian devil by Alexis Rockman

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and Mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Cormac McCarthy. Final paragraph of The Road.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ends on a hopeful note. The sweet small boy has been taken in by a family of good people. In the first chapter a series of massive nuclear blasts had destroyed the whole world and, it’s inferred, most animal and plant life and most humans. What is honourable in humankind has survived though and there is a sense of some kind of renewal. But the cryptic final paragraph reveals that the world cannot be remade and can never again be a paradise. I first read the novel when it was newly published and I didn’t give much thought to what the world might have been like in the moments before the blasts. Then Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, along with environmental scientists from the United Nations, made me reconsider the notion of war. We’re already seeing small wars breaking out over food and water. In the last few days news stories about cloning and genetic manipulations, along with reading Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, have made me wonder if the natural world, in The Road, had already been destroyed beyond recognition before those fateful nuclear blasts.  

The coffee wars were over the new Happicuppa bean developed by a HelthWyzer subsidiary. Until then the individual coffee beans on each bush had ripened at different times and needed to be hand-picked processed and shipped in small quantities, but the Happicuppa coffee bush was designed so that ll of its beans would ripen simultaneously, and coffee could be grown on huge plantations and harvested with machines. This threw the small growers out of business and reduced both them and their labourers to starvation-level poverty. The resistance movement was global. Riots broke out, crops were burned, Happicuppa cafes were looted, Happicuppa personnel were car-bombed or kidnapped or shot by snipers or beaten to death by mobs; and, on the other side, peasants were massacred by the army.

Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake.

 Oryx and Crake is also strangely hopeful in the way that The Road is. Humankind has been destroyed through an act of biological terrorism, but a set of humanoid creatures that had been bred without artistic and religious impulses, begins to create images and develop a sense of the divine as they seek to understand their world. But the natural world had already been perverted and societies torn apart by genetic manipulations of plants and animals before all the humans died.

They had lunch at one of the five-star Rejoov restaurants, on an air-conditioned pseudo balcony overlooking the main Compound organic-botanics greenhouse. Crake had the kanga-lamb, a new Australian splice that combined the placid character and high protein yield of the sheep with the kangaroo’s resistance to disease and the absence of methane-producing ozone-destroying flatulence. Jimmy ordered the raisin stuffed capon – real free-range capon, real sun-dried raisins, Crake assured him. Jimmy was so used to Chickie Nobs by now, to their bland tofu-like consistency and their inoffensive flavour, that the Capon tasted quite wild.

Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake.

 At Christmas I read Margaret Mittelbach and David Crewdson’s Carnivorous Nights, their account of a trip made to Tasmania in search of the Tasmanian Tiger and the myths that had grown up around it. They were accompanied by Alexis Rockman, who did the illustrations for the book. At the beginning of the trip they visited scientists at the Australian Museum in Sydney who were working on a project to clone a Tasmanian Tiger from an embryo stored there. It sounded crazy, straight out of Jurassic Park. Crewdson and Mittelbach imagined “…a zoo of now extinct animals: dodos, passenger pigeons, woolly mammoths.”

The Farm by Alexis Rockman