Book Review: The Road

"The Road"

By Cormac McCarthy

It hasn't been easy for me to delve into Cormac McCarthy's extensive canon. I couldn't get past the odd writing style of "No Country for Old Men" a year ago and, despite the beautiful prose, I didn't find the plot of "All the Pretty Horses" all that compelling. With that said, it's kind of interesting that "The Road," which features a depressing post-apocalyptic plot, is the first Cormac McCarthy novel I've finished reading in its entirety.

This is, at once, the most simple and most ambitious of the McCarthy novels I've read. He focuses exclusively on two characters, a boy and his father, and their journey along "the road" that runs through the former United States years after the apocalypse has occurred. What exactly happened is ambiguous; the novel hints at the possibilities only in several brief flashbacks. All that we know, and all that McCarthy really cares about, is the apocalypse's aftermath and how it affects these two characters.

We know that just about everything is dead - entire forests, all of the fish, and billions of people. All that remains are the ever-ubiquitous clouds of ash, trunks of dead trees, extreme cold, and essentially no food, which begets marauding bands of cannibals who collect stragglers for their own survival.

McCarthy's spare prose is brilliant and elegant; its halting quality perfectly encapsulates the incessantly dour atmosphere and texture of this story. Occasionally, the author pushes the philosophical aspects harder than need be: "Who is it? said the boy. I don't know. Who is anybody?" Aside from those moments, the writing is a joy to read. Here's a prototypical passage that is found near the end of the novel - I love the way it is at once spare and descriptive at the same time.

"The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He'd stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle." (230)

At the heart of the novel is the relationship between the man and his son. The man, coughing up blood and carrying a pistol with only a couple rounds in it, swears to protect his son, who was born right after the apocalypse, at all costs. The boy, as described in the novel, is a metaphor for our innate, and perhaps foolish, hope that, despite our mistakes, we have the capacity to start over again. The father's pledge becomes especially apparent in a conflict with another man, the first they have seen in over a year, who holds the boy at knife-point; the man shoots him dead immediately. The boy is shocked by his father's occasional brutality - not giving part of their limited food supply to a passerby, for example - which complicates their relationship.

In one flashback, we learn that the man's wife committed suicide, mocking the man for wanting to live through such a nonexistent world. The question does arise on more than one occasion: Why do these two survivors continue on? For the most part, they spend their days traveling down a silent road flanked by the trunks of trees; starving for many days before discovering left-over provisions; and heading towards the south, away from the biting cold that resulted, presumably, from nuclear fallout. In the end, the book is incredibly depressing, and yet, oddly uplifting, as we realize that humans have the capacity both to destroy themselves and to be persistent in the face of incredible adversity. McCarthy even has us believe, for a while at least, that the love between the father and his son can successfully weather the hardships of a now-dead world.

Rating: 9.5