‘The Road’ is a short novel set in a ravaged America. An unspecified catastrophe has killed off most signs of visible life. The landscape is barren and teems only with dead trees and ubiquitous gray ash, which blocks the sunlight and forces the few scattered survivors to don makeshift masks. A father and his young son walk along a road, wheeling a small cart of ragged clothes and scavenged tins of food. Their only defence is a pistol with two bullets. They are heading south, towards the coast, though, like the father, we aren’t entirely sure why it’s so important they make it to the sea.
I should mention a quick caveat. The precise cause of this disaster is not clear. Neither character mentions it much. Indeed, we soon find out that the young boy was only born a few days after the catastrophe set in (and the father still remembers the precise time the clocks stopped: 1.17am). One of the bits of rather effusive blurb on the back casts McCarthy’s novel as ‘the first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation’. But I think this is wide of the mark. The novel is not resonant in the slightest with a hortatory message about climate change. (One needn’t be a climate change sceptic to have misgivings about righteous climate change novels). Rather, the focus is on the symbiotic relation between the (anonymous) father and son, as they trudge along the road with no ostensibly clear end in sight, and the existential stasis of this endlessness.
The desolation is suitably embodied in the structure and style. McCarthy gives a single paragraph to each incident or event, whether a mundane early morning sunrise or occasional, dreamlike remembrances. He writes tersely, with only occasional flourishes enlivening the barren vocabulary. It’s as if words themselves have become as half-forgotten as the old world: ‘the sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality’. McCarthy only occasionally breaks out and widens the verbal breadth. The first meeting with another character introduces a menace which retains a frightening, shadowy presence throughout: gangs of cannibalistic wanderers with troupes of raped women and enslaved catamites in tow. As one of these gray devils stumbles across the pair, the father pulls out a pistol and explains to their would be assailant, in a rare elaboration upon his customary single sentence replies to his son’s questions, that the bullet from his gun, ‘will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.’
But, in the main, the dialogue between father and son is almost brusque. (Are we going to die? | No. Do you want to ride in the cart? | It’s okay). The son has a redolent innocence in his queries. He regularly seeks reassurance from his father that they are, indeed, ‘the good guys’, that they’ve ‘got the fire’, and his father – never wholly convincingly – insists that they are. The boy’s vulnerability is underlined by his father’s constant vigilance, looking out for food and firewood, rubbing his son warm in the bitter chill under a makeshift tarpaulin tent. This contrasts strongly with the occasionally sickening vignettes which emphasise, if the unceasing battle against hunger and cold didn’t already, their pathetic, fragile predicament. Only occasionally do we catch glimpses of the horror from which the father aches to protect his son by constantly fingering the pistol in his pocket. At one point, walking into yet another deserted house, they break open a padlocked trapdoor and encounter a basement of naked, limbless people being harvested for food. The details McCarthy provides in this and a handful of other sequences are brief but painfully precise. And this shadowy terror animates the atmosphere of the novel in an arresting way.
But, at root, the novel is symbolized by the dilemma of the pistol. After the afore-mentioned encounter, they are left with just one bullet. We also learn that at one point, there were three bullets. The mother and wife figure, we learn, had turned the gun on herself, soon after giving birth, seeking the release into nothingness instead of numbering among the ‘walking dead’. Ostensibly, the father’s predicament revolves around keeping his son alive by scavenging for provisions. His son appears to be helpless and dependent. But, in another sense, it is the son who is keeping his father alive through a naïve goodness. Upon encountering the poor souls in the basement or a stinking old man, the son is repulsed by their inability and his father’s unwillingness to help others, at risk to themselves, the father keeps emphasising. And the father’s dilemma revolves around whether he may have to turn this pistol, which he clings onto to protect his son (his ‘god’), onto his boy. (There is a chilling scene when it emerges that the father has already explained to the son how to turn a gun on himself if ever he was ‘caught’). In part, then, the novel reads like a meditation on Camus’ famous question. I couldn’t possibly reveal how this tension ultimately plays out, but it is gripping.
I hadn’t read anything by Cormac McCarthy before. Some people have raved about him to me. In truth, I’m not sure how representative ‘The Road’ is of his work in general. But, I found it thoroughly captivating. It’s a terrible cliché, but I rarely devour novels: I read this one in the obligatory day (though, admittedly, it is rather short). Not so long ago, I read Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, in the main a reflection upon his time in Dachau. And this novel reminded me of some of the existential questions Frankl considers to be an essential – perhaps the essential – aspect of being human. It also illuminates in spite of or perhaps even through its bleakness how our existence can only begin to make sense relationally. I was left profoundly moved and yet this is not simply some mawkish response. To my mind, the novel offers – and I’m not sure how this relates to McCarthy’s thought in general – an aching hint at what we might mean when we speak of love, not as a sloppy sentiment but as a true passion, embodied in the smallest of acts and quietest of gestures, in enduring silence and seeming futility: this question of futility may be something worth pursuing if anyone has read it and knows how the narrative pans out. Anyhow, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
(I borrowed the book from the shop, but will be on the lookout for a suitable second hand copy: will gladly pass it onto anyone interested when – not if – I pick a copy up).
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