Book Reviews
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
You will be excused as a reader for merely thinking this story some biblical tale of a father and his son. Or maybe a contemporary retelling of a Greek tragedy. And yet the bond between the father and son in McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic America has its bloodline in one and its pathos in the other.
America has been ruined by a cataclysmic event. Ash drifts and settles on everything. There is no food except that which can be scavenged. Canned food is a droll gratification for fast food, but for its necessity. It’s dismally cold. Snow flies in great sheets of uniformity and the “banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.” Roving bands of marauders feverishly covet their stockpiles of living flesh or skewer young life on the spit. There are no animals except for visceral man, “Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks.” All is lost.
Man in The Road exists at a nadir of human misery never imagined before because there is no more hope. And you are convinced of this by the brutal reality and marrow-chilling, metaphysical exactness of McCarthy’s language. It’s stripped down to the bare atoms of survival. It is so precise that you feel each smutty snowflake melt in the grey nothingness of a world destroyed by some unmentionable act. A gut-wrenching irony since the dust and particles are what once called this planet into existence.
But even though the book’s environment is hostile, uninhabitable except in skeletal remains of houses or burnt-out cars or under ramshackle bits of ironmongery and tarpaulin, a tangible beauty slices the narrative into part gothic adventure and the alchemical power of imaginable love: the transformative love that a father has for his son. It’s fragile, though, like the motorcycle mirror the father attaches to their trusty shopping cart to keep vigilance on the expired road behind them. But it is also mineral strong. Charred corpses may litter the highways but the love of one human being for another is never given but poured out as if love had known no name until now.
But what chance of survival do these two rag-and-bone protagonists of the heart have in such a derelict landscape with bloodletting carnivores around every bend? They are heading south to the sea, though the father cannot be sure what they will find there or even if they will make it. Along the way they set hidden fires in carbonized woods; explore ruined houses; scavenge for anything edible, even if it’s shriveled apples or dust. But the father has promised the son that they will never eat human flesh. They avoid other rag-bound scarecrows that pass as humans like the plague. But when they do encounter one shrouded in rags, an old man, who is in turn pitiful but also weirdly sagacious, it is the boy who offers to share their food, innocent of the father’s knowledge that the old man won’t make it. And as they trudge on, as the father continues to cough blood out of earshot of his skin-and-bone son, knowing secretly that his end is near, they stumble along with the “cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”
McCarthy’s language is beautifully etched out of this bleakness. His varied narratives of short and long touch on the urgency of poetry and read like an illuminated manuscript of terror and passion. Every simple act, like the lighting of a fire, its blue flames whooshing in the air, is rendered so lovingly that the horror manages to stay its ground. While reading we ache for all the fleeting normalcy of our own world: the mundane, the trivial, the underappreciated simplicity, the beauty, even the ugliness seems bearable compared to such a vision painstakingly rendered in the book. Even the dialogue between father and son is adamantine in its plainsong. Nothing of excess here. Little eruptions of words feeding the cold surety that life has come to, if not now, then very soon, its final calculated end.
Still, you can’t help but feel energized, engaged, convinced, and mesmerized by the language chiseled down to clear perfection. There’s an aptness that mirrors the slow building up of dread, of the horror, of the miserable syllogism of what humanity is capable of. But the paradox is, of course, that despite the dire prognostications or the violent nature we all possess, it is the simple, reassuring love between father and son that sticks.
Even the real possibility of the father having to shoot his own son to save him is only the darker side of love. For this novel pushes boundaries even in a monochromatic one. What are we capable of doing for love when it is simply a desiccated bud on the tree of life? More than we can imagine. “My job is to take care of you,” says the father to the boy. A simple, paternal responsibility that takes on spiritual dimensions. Because the father isn’t simply protecting the boy’s body from physical harm, there is the “fire” to consider, too. And what is this fire? Surely it is the fire that Prometheus stole from heaven. It is creative singularity that believes that there is still goodness in the human condition even if it is reduced to a shambling, stinking corpse that travels a road to nowhere.
The Road asks not so much what hope is there for the characters so much as what guarantee can we supply them, fictional though they are, that we won’t make the same mistakes in our fleeting world.
