My Latest Book Review: THE ROAD

THE ROAD

by Cormac McCarthy




A retching, sickly man and his fearful young son walk an empty freeway from a horrific past to an unknowable future. Burnt out cars, skeletal trees and the smoke-enshrouded ruins of cities form their scenery. This is the underworld brought to life and father and son have become "each the other's world entire."

For those unfamiliar with Cormac McCarthy’s sparse style, archaic phrasing (he revives words long dead and buried, like ‘roofingtin’; ‘illcarved’) and wild America landscapes, The Road might prove frustratingly inconclusive – you can’t classify it. It’s not a sci-fi, although it is a future-set tale of survival – two refugees following a road through a post-apocalyptic hell.
We aren’t told how things came to be this way; only that one night there was a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” That’s as much as you’re going to get by way of explanation. Plot is less important; the characters’ reactions to their circumstances are what matter. In fact, the vagueness of it all is what unsettles the reader as much as the characters.
As father and son make their way, for no apparent reason, to the coast, they must scrounge for every morsel and fight off characters more desperate than themselves.

This theme of characters often as lost as the reader might feel, began in 1985 with Blood Meridian, a violent retelling of the Davy Crockett legend; it continued in the nightmarish The Orchard Keeper, then traveled on into McCarthy’s breakthrough Border Trilogy – which led to a film version of All The Pretty Horses. After that, this underground author gained notoriety and his next release, In the Country of Old Men, was snapped up for movie rights before it hit the shelves. A more accessible thriller of sorts, it disappointed some who had followed McCarthy’s slow, non-conformist journey from cult author to Oprah guest. In The Road he reverts to form, with the power to communicate in one sparse sentence what lesser writers take pages to do.

The Road has a sense of timelessness – mythological, almost – grounded firmly in the landscapes his characters traverse. In a story that might as easily have been set in the Dark Ages, events unfold with a directness and honesty that moves - without relying on sentimentality.

McCarthy still remains, and covets, the loner character – a figure so isolated in his fictional world that only the reader is looking out for him. In The Road, it is this empathic force that could leave you with a lump in your throat and most surprisingly, given the bleakness of the story as a whole – a sense of hope for humanity.