Monday, August 9, 2010

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Lately I've been reading Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road. Ordinarily, one waits until finished with a book to write about it; I've tried but there's something that, this time, won't wait. The setting is the future -- not so distant that cars, trains, and ships are obsolete, not so near as to be unbelievable. The world is post-apocalyptic. We don't know what has happened except to say that civilization as we know it is a memory most would prefer to forget.

There may have been a nuclear war, an asteroid may have struck the earth, it's hard to say. There is ash everywhere and scarcely a living thing besides. The lead characters, a father and his young son -- how young, we're never told, but too young to survive on his own -- are traveling on foot to an unnamed coast. Their belongings in knapsacks and a shopping cart, they live as best they can off the waste that surrounds them.

McCarthy is hardly a transparent writer and what he wants to say is as difficult to determine as the ash-laden air is for father and son to breathe. You have to pick it up along the way in bits and pieces, a fragment of life here, a gleam of light there. And what I think may be only what I'd say, my own predispositions interposing themselves onto his poetic prose. And that may be the way he wants it.

What I see is a father who would likely have ceased living but for his son and a son who would never have survived but for his father. Days without food and nights in the cold. No reason to hope and even less to hope for and yet the father refuses to allow either of them to give up. The boy sees things no one should and yet he wants to share what they don't have with one who has nothing.

I'm forty or so pages from the end and how it will end is anybody's guess. I don't think it will end in death. It might, but I doubt it. McCarthy has these two pulling through at the expense of no one else. What the father would have held back, the son gives away, and together, they render their lives humane. I think Camus would have liked this story. A desolate world wearing the face of irrationality, and in it father and son keep each other going, and even if it seems they're going nowhere, one way or another they'll get there together. Call me crazy, but I call that hope.


(Creative Commons image of The Road by Pickersgill Reef via Flickr)

2 comments:

  1. Too many unknowns in this book..some you have mentioned..a couple that bothered me was ..why they left the bunker full of food..and exactly what did he expect to find on the coast..the movie was much better as it had R.Duvall in it which to me was pleasant suprise..hes a great actor and I wish he was in the movie more..I think it would have "bettered" the movie

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  2. I think they left the bunker for two reasons. First, the father was fearful they would be found and caught like rats in a trap. Second, you notice the father frequently doesn't take everything he can from a resource -- this, in contrast to the "bad men" who appear to live like locusts. He takes as much as they can carry, especially food and water, but he acts with a certain moderation. As to why they were intent on getting to the coast, I agree, that's left unsaid and I'm inclined to think McCarthy was trying to say there is a goal-directedness, a teleology in philosophical terms, to a life that is both human and humane, and this in contrast to the "bad men" who seem to move aimlessly, scavenging to survive. That's my take on it, though McCarthy might say I completely missed the boat.

    Interesting you should mention the film since I picked it up this afternoon and I'm looking forward to seeing it.

    Thanks for your comment -- I appreciate it!

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