“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. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
“You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.
“Yes. We’re still the good guys.”
“And we always will be.”
“Yes. We always will be.”
“Okay.”
So one day, out of sheer boredom, I took one of those Facebook quizzes. This one took your answers to odd questions and surmised which novelist you would be, and 45 seconds later, the computer punched up “Cormac McCarthy” for me. I’d heard the name here or there, but never read his work (although I later found out that “No Country for Old Men,” which quickly became one of my favorite movies, was his), so when my sister-in-law recommended his masterpiece, “The Road” (it won the Pulitzer, if that kind of thing is important to you), I gave it a shot.
I was quickly taken aback by McCarthy’s short, clipped sentences, his Faulknerian style of breaking up clauses into abbreviated sentences. The sparse punctuation, including no apostrophes in contractions, made it difficult at times to discern dialogue from description, but McCarthy’s incredible language, similes and metaphors (“A blackness to hurt your ears with listening … By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.”) more than made up for it. Some reviewers characterized McCarthy’s descriptions as nearly Biblical, ascribing him with a incredible vocabulary, and I had to agree -- I was sent scrambling to the dictionary more than a few times.
“The country was looted, ransacked, ravaged. Rifled of every crumb. The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before battle.
“Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.”
The story itself was very reminiscent of Stephen King’s “The Stand,” with the two main characters launched into a post-apocalyptic world that has been destroyed by some unnamed disaster that we’re never told of. It’s a wasted landscape, a gray void with nearly everything burnt to a crisp, reduced to rubble and covered in ash. The father and son at the center of this struggle for survival are never named, known only as “the man” and “the boy” throughout the story. The mother committed suicide at some point in the past, leaving the father to protect the son with his life through all manner of threats, perils and mishaps. We follow the duo as they cut a path through the horror toward the coast, trying to avoid roving bands of half-wild cannibals, the elements, hunger, sickness and ennui.
Repeatedly, the man has to break his son’s compassionate streak with the reality that they are fighting for their lives each and every day, with no room for generosity or kinship with any fellow survivors. They wander through deserted towns, homes and farms, looking for any morsels of food or drink to sustain them for another day, another hour. Their sole possessions are bundled into an old grocery cart, with all they are and all they have protected by a pistol with a single bullet.
“He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’s lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”
There are moments of redemption, bright spots in the darkness. Halfway through the tale, they find a fallout shelter stocked with food and all the necessities—but even that is fleeting, as it isn’t safe to stay there in case they are discovered by the “bad guys,” the cannibals who are enslaving and devouring any remaining holdovers. The father very occasionally shifts into first person, which was jarring but offered deep insights into the fears he has of growing sick and being unable to protect his son (“The slow surf crawled and seethed in the dark and he thought about his life but there was no life to think about and after a while he walked back.”). These moments feel very personal, partially because McCarthy has revealed that the tale is semi-autobiographical, with the boy based on his son and some of the inherent worries that come along with being an elderly father (McCarthy is 76, while his son is 8). Of course, the all-encompassing totality of the love between father and son makes up the core of the book, the foundation upon which the story is built … the reality that each other is all they have to make it possible to wake up again each morning, despite the seeming pointlessness of it all (“I don’t know what we’re doing,” the boy finally manages at one point), is a powerful, powerful theme.
“Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”
“‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Yes. Of course you can.’
‘What would you do if I died?’
‘If you died I would want to die too.’
‘So you could be with me?’
‘Yes. So I could be with you.’
‘Okay.’”
The clipped sentences are especially effective at building terror and tension. The starkness of the prose also lends to the overriding sense of the suddenness that comes along with unexpected events … it’s as if this series of horrific scenes rises up out of the page like a freight train coming around a corner. The result is a quick, but gut-wrenching and emotional read. I took one death in the book as hard as any I’ve ever read, dating back to the loss of Jake Chambers (his third death, for those of you keeping score at home) in King’s “Dark Tower” series or Simon in “Lord of the Flies,” finding myself crying in the wee hours.
“I want to be with you.”
“You can’t.”
“Please.”
“You can’t. You have to carry the fire.”
“I don’t know how to.”
“Yes you do.”
“Is it real? The fire?”
“Yes it is.”
“Where is it? I don’t know where it is.”
“Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.”
“The Road” has been hailed in some quarters as a seminal, hugely important environmental book, while others characterize it as science fiction and still others (myself included) paint it as a story about the love that emerges between a father and his son in the most forebidding and hopeless of times (“This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man’s brains out his hair. That is my job … Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly … But when he bent to see into the boy’s face under the hood of the blanket he very much feared that something was gone that could not be put right again.”). McCarthy’s book has many overtones -- including the imagery of the boy as an angel -- that reminded me very much of the epic “Children of Men.” Indeed, and disappointingly predictably, “The Road” has been turned into a movie (starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) slated for release this October.
“When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you can’t give up. I won’t let you.”
“But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find the little boy?”
“Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”
In this world of blogs and tweets, 10-second sound bites and podcasts, iPhone apps and texts, we are losing the ability to truly impact other human beings through the written word. We absorb, we scan, we move on. We don’t think, we don’t digest, we don’t consider. As a writer, it can be quite frustrating, upsetting and frightening, to see the language stolen, to see prose and grammar bastardized, to see tone twisted. So to find a book that reads like a 300-page punch to the diaphragm … to stumble across a work of art that evokes emotion … to not so much read, as experience, a piece that elevates as it depresses … it can restore a little faith to a vessel that’s increasingly found wanting. And if I found anything in McCarthy’s stark, gray, lonely, ashen, tilted world, it was that—a rediscovery of inspiration through literature, blooming like a solitary white rose in a field of rock.
Being a witness to McCarthy’s immense talents can be a bit overwhelming and make you feel unworthy of calling yourself a writer … but it still made the journey along this road an unforgettable and awe-inspiring experience.
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