Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Review from Rocky Mountain News (2006)

 

This is my review of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, The Road -- which won the Pulizer Prize in 2007. The review was published in the now long-gone Rocky Mountain News. 

 

'Road' scholar - Cormac McCarthy proves he's still in the driver's seat with raw apocalyptic tale Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO) (Published as Rocky Mountain News (CO)) - September 29, 2006
Author/Byline: Duane Davis, Special to the News
Edition: Final
Section: Spotlight
Page: 27D
 

Cormac McCarthy is 73 years old, and with the novels Suttree, Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain) firmly established in the canon of American literature, he might be expected to rest on his laurels as one of our best living novelists.

Instead, hard on the heels of last year's bang-up, noir-ish No Country For Old Men, we have in hand a brand new work, his 10th novel, The Road - and, despite his age, it is clear that McCarthy is not going gently into that good night spoken of by the poets. If No Country hit rimshots off the noir/hardboiled thriller conventions, The Road takes us deep into the post-apocalypse sci-fi territory of Mad Max and The Road Warrior.

 

Using a plot as simple as any devised by Samuel Beckett (who once wrote a whole novel about a man crawling through a mud field), McCarthy sets this book in a ruined landscape of ash and desolation, a nuclear winter in which not a blade of grass, not a tree, not a bird, not a living thing other than man, degraded and reduced to starvation and scavenging, has survived.
 

Through this cold and blighted world, a man and his son walk south on highways littered with the debris of a dead civilization, pushing all they own in a grocery cart as they dodge bandits and cannibals. In a terrible irony, the man is armed - he carries a revolver with two bullets hoarded against the time when, all options gone, he will have to shoot first the boy and then himself.

 

This being McCarthy, we find this violent, grotesque world rendered in gorgeous, melancholic, even biblical cadences: "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe . . . Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

There is much here to suggest that this is McCarthy's valediction to his time and place, a summoning and summing up of last things, a worn rosary of those astonishingly few things we truly need in our lives: the touch of a hand, the soft whisper of words in the night. To be protected and to provide protection, to be safe- in a world that will ever deny us those very things: "The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true." The world grinds us down; and it grinds us ceaselessly.

 

Make no mistake: This is a lurid and horrific world - The Book of Job retold by Wes Craven: "The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latter-day bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth."

 

But if the dead are everywhere, it may be that they are the lucky ones for this is a place "largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes." A world where our great cities are held by "blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell." A world where the road itself is no longer a symbol of freedom and movement: "A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling."

 

This is "the road" as an anonymous and unnumbered circle of hell.

 

In the ash and debris, the litter and burnt clutter of this book, there is clearly more than a hint of a post-9/11 world in which terror is no longer particular and isolate, but general, the very air through which a handful of survivors move. But if that were all - if the book merely followed the bloody tracks of a pair of survivors stumbling across a wasteland - it would simply be a ledger of loss, an account figured in nothing but negative sums. But McCarthy has crafted something more.

 

In the bond between the boy and his father, the reader finds the barest beginnings of hope, the flicker of a possible future rising out of heaped slag and havoc. In the midst of a desolate and ravaged countryside, remaining human becomes the most difficult of tasks and responsibilities. Reduced to the most mean and bare of circumstances, this is a place and time where the cliches of care and love and sacrifice are lifted up and made new and whole again: The man tells the boy, "This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up."

 

This is a Fable of Ending, a glossary of goodbyes written in the very grammar of sorrow and loss. Here's a promise: When you finish this book, if you should happen to wake in the middle of the night, you will long for the touch of a hand in the darkness, the soft whisper of words in the silence - and you will know their worth. Few books can do more; few have done better. Read this book.
 

INFOBOX
The Road
* By Alfred A. Knopf, 241 pages, $24.
* Grade:A

Copyright: Donated to the Denver Public Library by the Rocky Mountain News, under the permission of the City and County of Denver, other rights
reserved. Copyright © 2006 Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.