I finished the Road this weekend. My wife read it too. I don't think she enjoyed it as much as I did because she's letting some questions bother her that, I feel, aren't really relevant to the story. But the discussion I had with her brought up some good questions to discuss here.
For instance, the reason the world is in the shape it is...this is never explained and this really bothers her. She can't just accept that the world IS in the state that its in and this is the reason for the drama...the vehicle if you will. It doesn't so much matter what caused it. This isn't what the book is about. But to her its a stumbling block. I tried to offer my ideas. My theory is that the world has suffered a natural disaster. This was not a nuclear war situation. The reason I think this is that radiation is never talked about and, early in the book, "the man" says something about wanting to throttle God. If it had been a nuclear war, wouldn't he blame humanity? I think it was a meteor/meteor shower that laid waste to the planet. The description of this post-apocalyptic world makes me think of the scenario that a lot of scientists give us when they're describing the dinosaur extinction.
She also took issue with the fact that these people survived and why more people are not alive during this story. "Why are these people so special? Why aren't there more people? Why are some houses still standing?" Seems like pretty obvious answers to me. First of all, these people aren't "special", which is to say that it isn't like they were "the Chosen" or something. They were just lucky. Secondly, there's lots of ways people and structures can survive something like that. Perhaps the people and structures that did survive were in valleys and/or higher land levels and the shock waves missed them. The reason that most people are dead? Well...a natural disaster like that would kill A LOT of people. The initial impact of the asteroids, the tsunamis after wards, possibly earthquakes triggered by large asteroids landing in fault lines, etc. Even if all this killed only half of the population there'd be a lot of dead bodies, damaged infrastructures, etc which is going to breed a lot of disease, lawlessness, starvation, etc. So while there may have been many survivors after the initial catastrophe there'd be plenty going on that could kill a whole lot more people.
Your thoughts?