The end of the world as we know it

IN JANUARY, WHEN the temperature is 20 degrees above normal, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of planetary meltdown. Do we need Al Gore -- or Nostradamus, even -- to tell us that there was something a bit worrying about New England's latest warm spell? Not real weather, this dizzy mildness, but something (or so it felt) like a false spring in the autumn of the world -- not a reprieve, but a guarantor of future extremity.

It's the artist's job, of course, to be in the vanguard of anxiety, and we can consider ourselves well served in this respect by the American novelist Cormac McCarthy and the Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón. McCarthy's new "The Road" (Knopf) and Cuarón's "Children Of Men," which opened in theaters last month, are about the future, or more accurately about the possibility of there not being one.

"The Road" is flatly postnuclear: "The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions." Man here has done his worst, and is now choking in the clouds of a self-exacted doomsday. An unnamed father and his son are making their painful way to the coast in search of "good guys" -- which is to say, humans who do not eat other humans. The boy's most frequent utterance, generally made after his father has explained something to him, is "Okay" -- a solemn and childish assent to the new reality.

"There is no other deal. This is it."

"Okay."

"Children Of Men" is closer to what we know: Here is Britain in 2027, bomb-ridden and churning with sociopolitical uproar but still wanly beautiful in its countryside, flared over by leaky sunsets, its cities caught as usual in cycling grayness. The West is going up in flames, but police state Britain, as the televisions announce, "soldiers on." Men commuting to work are still wearing suits and ties, even if the trains have their windows chicken-wired against the projectiles of a surly populace. A fawn scoots nervously, but with perfect authority, down the hallway of a derelict school -- Nature taking her chances like everyone else.

The school is derelict because there are no children. There haven't been any children for 18 years; Mother Earth has crossed her arms and said No More. As the movie begins news is just breaking that the world's youngest person, a man known as Baby Diego, has been stabbed by a jilted fan. General mourning: the wreaths are piling up, Diana-style. (Elsewhere, as immigrants or "fugees" are herded into cages, we see the nightmare hoods and snarling, weaponized canines of Abu Ghraib.)

But humanity's end is not quite nigh; secretly, one single woman is eight months pregnant. The insurgents have her, and the state is bent on the destruction of those insurgents, but if Theo (played by Clive Owen) can get her to a certain buoy off the English coast, at a certain time, she and her baby will be safe.

It would be idle to point out the consonances between McCarthy's book and Cuarón's movie -- the end-time, the precious child, the journey to the water's edge -- were it not that these images are inscribed with another shared preoccupation: faith. The search for something to live by, a principle or perspective that will clarify present suffering, is the deeper quest of both works. The father's care of his son in "The Road" is one long and bitter act of devotion, witnessed by a creator of whose intentions he could not be less sure.

"My job is to take care of you," he tells the boy firmly, "I was appointed to do that by God."

But in those flashes of haunted, prayerful inwardness of which McCarthy is the master recorder, he is rebellious: "Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned."

In "Children Of Men" the pregnant woman is threatened by a British soldier (he might as well be from Rome) and the midwife who is traveling with her erupts into a loud prayer to the archangel Gabriel. The baby is born, and the buoy is reached. We are closing in here on "that contrast" (as G.K. Chesterton wrote) "between the cosmic creation and the little local infancy" that is the essence of the Nativity. The sea around them, as they wait to be picked up, is a sighing broth of pollutants, but succor and support are coming -- shouldering its way out of the mist, a ship called Tomorrow.

James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com.