Title: The Road Author: Cormac McCarthy Publisher: Knopf Publication Date(s): September 26th, 2006 (Roughcut Hardcover) Score: 10 (Out of 10)

THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy (Review)

C ormac McCarthy's THE ROAD is one of the bleakest, dark, depressing horrific books that I've ever read, and that is saying a lot. It also very well might be the best, truest, and most beautifully written novels that I've ever read, and without a doubt one of the most important.

THE ROAD is about the end of humanity, or at least the end of civilization. Some time before the events portrayed in the book there was some kind of cataclysm that ultimately destroyed all civilization everywhere. It is never explained whether this event was due to nuclear attack, a meteor strike, a massive tectonic shift, or some other world-shattering event, but that is not important. Whatever was the cause, society crumbled almost immediately. Cars stopped wherever they were, all clocks stopped at 1:17 (at least in the time zone where the protagonist is), many cities crumbled into ruin in the blink of an eye, and nuclear winter (or at least the equivalent thereof) began. A firestorm swept uncontrolled across the world, burning people to cinders as they fled. Everywhere the dead lay burned and unburied, and then the real horrors began, as the thin veneer of civilization was swept away and humans reverted to bestial survival instincts, turning on and murdering each other for food, shelter, or other creature comforts. What animals survived the initial destruction were soon depleted and devoured by the unfettered bestial appetites of the surviving humans. With no more cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, and so on, it did not take long for the desperate survivors to turn to cannibalism. Nomadic groups of desperate, starving cannibals now stalk the darkened world, preying on any that seem weaker than them. When the lights went out, the light of civilized humanity went as well.

But that is not the story. THE ROAD follows an unnamed old man and his son who was born on the day after the great cataclysm. They aren't given names because names are a thing of the civilized world, used so that people can refer to each other in conversation. Conversations are now a thing of the past as well, as most interaction between humans ends in bloodshed and cannibalism. The boy calls the man "Papa", and the man thinks calls the boy "son", or thinks about him merely as "the boy". The boy is now nine or ten years old, and has never lived in a world other than the harsh, bleak hell that now surrounds him. Despite this, the man has raised him on stories of a better, brighter age, and has tried to keep them both from the rapacious depravity that the rest of the world has descended into. In the stories that he tells the boy they are "Keepers of the Flame", pure pilgrims keeping the torch of civilized behavior, kindness, generosity and decency alive in a dark world. Though he tells the boy that there are other Keepers of the Flame out there, they have never met any. The man doesn't seem to believe that there are really other decent people out there, but it is important to him that his son lives as long as he can believing in decency and hope. As such they never steal from other survivors, they never attack other people, and they will never eat human flesh, no matter how badly they are starving. In all of this they are probably unique in the entire dead world.

Since the world is a dead and frozen husk, the pair are moving south towards the coast, hoping for somewhat warmer weather and less harsh conditions in what used to be tropical climes. It almost never rains, and when it snows the snow is gray and dangerous to drink. They gather what semi-safe water they can from old reservoirs, toilet tanks and flowing rivers (stagnant water would almost certainly be deadly), and scavenge canned food wherever they can find it. They have a beat-up old map, a tarp to sleep on, rags and plastic for shoes, and some blankets to keep warm at night. Their only weapon is a pistol with only two bullets remaining. The fact that there are two bullets and two of them is not a fact that is lost on them, should things get too bad. This is the sum total of their possessions, which they carry around in an old shopping cart as they travel south. And if they ever came afoul of other survivors, even these meager belongings would be enough for them to be killed for. They must keep constantly moving south, looking for safe food and water, avoiding all other living beings, and read to kill or die at any moment.

Even more bleak is the fact that not only is the entirety of their existence; it is also all they have to look forward to. Not once do they think they are moving towards some safe haven, some last bastion of civilization or uninhabited island paradise. Should even the greatest of their hopes come true, they will merely find their lot in life slightly less harsh and prolong their existence a little longer. The world is dead and there is no safe haven.

So what keeps them moving forward is their love for each other. As the McCarthy says, "Each is the other's world entire". No matter how bad things get, they know that if they wake up, then the other will be there for them. If not for the boy, the man would have let himself die long ago. And if not for the man, the boy would be dead, or no better than the cannibalistic hordes wandering the broken landscape around them. So even though there is no real hope of a better existence, they keep moving forward towards an ephemeral goal. It is no longer the destination that is important; it is the moment-to-moment act of putting one foot in front of the other, of having something, even a lie, to keep moving towards. If they had no goal then their lives would have no purpose, nothing to look forward to except inevitable death. So all they have is the journey, the road ahead, and each other. That is why it is called THE ROAD.

There is no better word for this book than "bleak". Unlike other novels in this sub genre, such as Stephen King's THE STAND or Robert McCammon's SWAN SONG use the end of the world as a medium to tell the story of a metaphysical power struggle. Even with civilization destroyed, humanity picks itself up and makes a final last ditch effort to preserve civilization, to make a better world out of the ashes of the old. These stories are about good versus evil, or civilization against anarchy and entropy. Not so with THE ROAD. There is no good or evil, just subsistence and survival, and how far one is willing to go to preserve their own lives at the expense of others'. There is no struggle of the forces of good versus the forces of evil, because the gods, if they exist, don’t care about us one way or the other. Even the phrase most often used to describe this genre, post-apocalyptic, doesn't apply, since "apocalypse" implies divine judgment or retribution, and this destruction was mindlessly secular. "Post-atomic" would be a better term.

There has never been a more horrific book than THE ROAD either. McCarthy does an exceptional job describing the day to day fear and pain that goes along with trying to eke out an existence in a violently malevolent world in ruin, where merely meeting another group of humans most likely means death. Starvation is a constant specter haunting them throughout the entire journey. Cannibalism is the norm, and very likely will be their end. Losing their meager possessions is just as much a death sentence, since they will not live long without their food, water, and blankets. False bravado and the threat of the two bullets in their gun have kept them from being raped and murdered more than once. There are several exceptionally well-realized scenes of mind-crippling horror, from the ruined plantation house that they search for food, and which hold a horrible secret, to the realization of what was cooking on the spit over the fire of another group of survivors. In fact, it is fair to say that dark and disturbing is this world's baseline, and that there are few moments were you or the characters are not unsettled, disturbed, or afraid. This book is truly about trying to live through Hell on Earth.

So why would one want to read such a dark, depressing, and bleak book, the emotionally-draining equivalent of a 256 page suicide note? Because against such a backdrop the little goodness that the man and his son hold up against the darkness shines so much the brighter, like a single star in a cold and indifferent sky. Small acts take on much greater meaning when the stakes are so high. For example, when they find a single soda in a smashed and ruined Coke machine, the first one they've seen since before the boy was born, the man's unhesitating generosity in giving the whole thing to his son seems an incredible sacrifice, since they may never see another. The man takes all his joy from watching the boy's nose wrinkle when tickled by the carbonated bubbles for the first time. The book is sprinkled with these jarringly domestic, loving moments that stand out all the more by standing in stark contrast to all the entropy, madness and death. However, it also makes the horror that much more harrowing when you realize that the father’s ultimate act of love may have to be cutting the boy’s throat with a shard of glass to save him from the roving packs of savages if all else fails. He has a hundred contingencies for their deaths, and all of them are acts of love. These are some of the most fully realized and sympathetic characters in American literature, even if the rest of the world they inhabit is damned.

The other, even more important reason to read THE ROAD is the sheer dark majesty of the prose. There are no chapters, nor even any extraneous punctuation to remove you from the narrative. It is all presented in a non-stop minimalist style, but still somehow lyrical in it’s simplicity. Each paragraph of the book is like a stanza in an epic poem, a postmodern Dante’s INFERNO. However, he never overstates this world (as I have done in this review) simply putting the cold facts out there in a very Hemmingway-esque sort of way, but with a sense of place unmatched since the days of Faulkner. If you’ll excuse the analogy, it is like Hemmingway wrote a novel based on notes written down by the love child of Lovecraft and Faulkner, performed as an epic poem. It’s nearly impossible to describe, so here is a passage from near the beginning of the book:

“They passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned. No sign of life Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in the doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put in your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, don’t you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”

And here’s another from a bit later on:

“People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.”

I guess you’ll either love it or you’ll hate it, but I honestly can’t understand how someone can’t be moved by the narrative being told. As simply as it is being told, there is myth and allegory buried in the ash, though you are never beaten over the head with it. For example, that fact that the clocks all stopped at 1:17 is important because this is also an important passage from the Christian Bible’s Book of Revelations (the bit about the Alpha and the Omega). There is a character named Ely late in the book (the only named character in the book) who may be symbolic of some other biblical or mythological character, but who speaks almost entirely in koans. When they first see him on the road, the boy wants to give him some of their food, and the man thinks to himself, “Perhaps he’d turn into a god and they into trees”, referring to the fact that in many mythologies, particularly Greek and Norse, the gods would often wander the world in the disguise of the blind and the pathetic, rewarding or punishing people for their kindness or cruelty. There are many other of these sorts of hints and mythological influences scattered throughout the book, and in many ways the story strongly reflects a vision of Hell not unlike that which Dante portrayed.

Said as simply as possible, this is one of the most beautiful, dark and important books written in the last 50 or so years. It may not be described as an “entertaining” read, and it certainly won’t play in Peoria, but for those with a literary slant of mind and a appreciation for stark elegance and beauty and simplicity, this is not a novel that should be missed. It will stay with you long after you have finished with it, haunting your thoughts with visions of the nightmarish world it portrays, as well as the simple beauty of the love between a father and his son. This is one of the most important books in the genre, and an instant classic. No true horror fan, nor any human with a working soul, should go without reading this book.