The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
17th Nov 2006, 01:55 GMT
A score or more years ago, Anthony Rudolf published a pamphlet entitled "Byron's Darkness: Lost Summer and Nuclear Winter". He presented Byron's poem - written in 1816, the year the sun rose unseen, thanks to a Brobdingnagian volcanic eruption - as a prognostication of the coming catastrophe. Ignoring the current preference for global warming as the means to our end, Cormac McCarthy has now chosen to reprise Byron's vision of a world in which "the bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars/ Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air".
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