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.
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