Our nuclear fantasies have gotten more hard-core.

"She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time."

Wait, run that by me again. Visionary and mystical or mumbo jumbo? Man will be immortal because the breath of God is undying and runs through man till the end of time? Which implies the survival and immortality of the human species against the weight of everything up until the last two pages of the book.

Is this a sudden tacked-on redemption that is designed to make us feel better about the ash heap the earth has become? Does this make McCarthy's novel a distant kin of the Christian "Left Behind" apocalyptic novels in which nuclear war is needed to prepare the way for the Divine Kingdom? Or is she just mouthing the words until they fatten the kid up for the feast? You could play this passage either as a kind of last-second oh boy, I better find something redemptive to tack on, or people are going to slit their wrists when they finish this book. Or could it be something even more sinister going on?

But then comes the final passage that really whipsaws one's consciousness.

It's about the brook trout in some "deep glens," location in time and space otherwise unspecified, and the markings on their backs

that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Nor be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

That passage certainly hums of mystery to me. Something is ineradicably ruined ("can't be put back"), and yet "in the deep glens," some kind of beings "older than man" persist and hum of mystery.

There's something visionary here that McCarthy is, I think, teasing us with. Using a key technique of nuke porn: withholding. I'd give up all I know about nuke porn past and present to have one conversation with Cormac McCarthy about what is going on in the deep glens of his post-nuclear imagination.

Correction, May 13, 2009: This piece originally stated that the playground nuke scene was set near Manhattan. Terminator 2 was set in Los Angeles. (Return  to the corrected sentence.)