The Road - Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy focuses on the strength of the battered human soul, the immutable desire to survive in a world where ‘nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave’

pp.307

Published: Picador, 2006

Cormac McCarthy, in this post-apocalyptic novel, does everything right. One of his major strengths as a writer is his poetic understatement – which we see in all of his work, from the psychotically violent No Country for Old Men to the beautifully panoramic All the Pretty Horses – and this understatement leaves a mental space for the reader to fill with their own reality, their own sense of horror. With such an oft-tackled and momentous subject as the end of the world, in The Road McCarthy treats the subject differently and is in horrendous control of his readership, capable of shocking us to the core, making us laugh, or leaving us in tears.

The unnamed Man and his son are two survivors in a landscape turned dead and grey ‘like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world’. This is a world laid waste, where ash covers the ground and floats through the air, where trees, dried out and dying, fall down without warning except the cracking of long-dehydrated bark. The Man and the Boy are travelling south in order to reach the coast, with some vague hope in mind that there will be something there for them, although the Man has no idea whether the sea will still be blue or whether it has turned the same dull, senseless grey of everything else.

  

Their journey is fraught with tension. Everything from the search for food and water, to keeping dry, to avoiding contact with the ‘bad guys’ – gangs of marauders travelling around together raping, pillaging and murdering – is part of the epic struggle to reach some ill-defined place that may bring salvation. There are a number of passages that will completely shock you, passages related to cannibalism, suicide, and the desperation of the human spirit under such circumstances. But I will not go through them here for fear they will lose their value.

The individual struggles of the Man and the Boy on their shared journey are rather different. The Man’s preoccupation is with protecting his son, doing anything it takes. He carries a pistol with them and we see that he is prepared to use it. He also covers the boys eyes when they come across any gruesome sights, saying that anything the Boy puts in his memory will be there forever.

On the other hand, the Boy is concerned with the morality of their means to survive. He asks his father again and again whether they are still carrying ‘the fire’, which is a lovely expression of human goodness burning within them. He insists again and again that they should find the ‘good guys’, that they should do nothing bad, no matter how desperate. After a close encounter with one of the ‘bad guys’, the boy is uncertain whether they have done something wrong, whether they have strayed into moral dubiousness by hurting him, and his father tries to reassure him:

             You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?

             Yes.

             He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? He said

             Yes. We’re still the good guys.

             And we always will be.

             Yes. We always will be.

             Okay. 

These heart-rending interchanges pepper the narrative, sometimes with humour and sometimes with sadness. They lend an intense humanity that makes the book sing.  

While the bare writing style McCarthy uses substantiates his belief that you shouldn’t have to blot the page up with ‘weird little marks’, it also surrounds the reader in this wastedness, this cold grey environment that gives nothing back, let alone punctuation. His dialogue is free of speech marks, though it is always clear who is speaking; the short sections have minimal paragraphing; and commas, at times, come very close to extinction. But in depicting a world empty finally of any kind of luxuries, how could the author justify using any grammatical luxuries himself? And so he doesn’t, and the story gains a deeper poignancy as a result.

We never learn exactly what has caused the world to be dying as it is in this novel, yet it never once matters, it never once becomes the issue. McCarthy focuses on the strength of the battered human soul, the immutable desire to survive in a world where ‘nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave’. And by distancing us from the details and intricacies of the tragedy it becomes all the more frightening for us, a generation constantly on the brink of war, with climate change a pervasive dread in the public consciousness, and with meteors travelling within a hairsbreadth of our atmosphere. In other words, the distancing paradoxically draws us closer to the disaster portrayed in the book. It is a disaster potentially on our very doorstep, ringing the bell incessantly.

I have read The Road four times since picking it up in 2010 and it has never ceased to alter me entirely as I read it. It exudes a deep sense of humanity, of humanness. It is a kind of parable showing the kindness, ugliness and strength of human nature. It is the novel McCarthy was destined to write, and one that he, and indeed any writer the world over, will struggle to better.