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Why I can’t get over “The Road.”
Cormac McCarthy’s been around for a while but quite frankly, I’ve never read any of his stuff. I was aware of “All the Pretty Horses” but I never read the novel or saw the film (hey! I have a twelve-year -old in the house and that limits us to little more violent than “The Transformers.”)
I picked up a paperback copy of The Road at the grocery store. I literally read the thing in one sitting. Not because it’s short (It really is,) because it’s riveting and I don’t say that very often or lightly.
What is it about?
Ten years before the novel begins, some kind of calamity befalls the Earth. A father and son are homeless.They push their pitiful belongings in a decrepit shopping cart, heading south because they “can’t survive another winter.” The landscape is bleak and gray, ash covers everything and McCarthy reveals in stunningly tight prose that apparently there very little is left alive. The world is wrapped in a gray cold winter that has gone on for the last decade. “Cattle has become extinct” muses the unnamed father as he struggles to protect his son from a very hostile world.
There is little food. What remains is decade old canned goods, nearly depleted. The pair trudge through cold burned-out husks of cities, long abandoned. There are people around, the most successful are groups of cannibals who prey on the weak or the careless. They sweep scavengers off the road and force them to march from place to place, serving as mobile larders. Others are kept precariously alive so that their limbs can be harvested. Fearing this fate, the unnamed protagonist’s wife commits suicide just before the two set out on their journey. The father,not quite coming to grips with his grief allows it to transform into a dogged mission to protect his son.
The prose in the novel is terse and sometimes misspelled. The word “cant” is often used to replace the contraction “can’t.” It’s as if McCarthy is allowing us a peek at an old, moldering journal by someone who is long since dead and gone. In a world that few of his readers can really conceptualize.
This is not an end of the world novel. The world of “The Road” has already ended. It ended long before father and son set out to find a better place. Readers are left with the feeling that, despite all the struggle, despite the death of all but a handful of people, the end of all humanity has finally happened and each survivor has to come to grips with their own choices. Then they must make peace with themselves before their own inevitable end. The father does this by focusing on his son, by creating a world-view that is only about his son’s survival.
This seems to be the subtext of the novel – or at least the part which resonated most strongly. It’s a book on parenting (strangely enough), the father understanding that his existence is is only about seeing his child to safety. This task is to the exclusion of all else, even morality and ethics. The father is a good man at heart, but he becomes transformed into a ruthless – even cruel person by his task. The unnamed mother’s suicide too is transformed into a sacrifice, so that her husband would not have to protect her as well. It’ an extraordinary tale of bravery in the face of inevitable and utter disaster. (Of course as a couple of people have pointed out that McCarthy may not have meant for Mom’s suicide to be a heroic act. I’m against suicide as a matter of principle so perhaps I’m mirroring my own feelings in this novel – as the author surely intended!)
If you read this book, do it by candlelight on a cold winters night and keep a window open. The chill you feel will not be from the cold!
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