The road to hell
Cormac McCarthy's vision of a post-apocalyptic America in The Road is terrifying, but also beautiful and tender, says Alan Warner
Alan Warner The Guardian, Saturday 4 November 2006 Article history
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
256pp, Picador, £16.99
Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy's other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America.
We can divide the contemporary American novel into two traditions, or two social classes. The Tough Guy tradition comes up from Fenimore Cooper, with a touch of Poe, through Melville, Faulkner and Hemingway. The Savant tradition comes from Hawthorne, especially through Henry James, Edith Wharton and Scott Fitzgerald. You could argue that the latter is liberal, east coast/New York, while the Tough Guys are gothic, reactionary, nihilistic, openly religious, southern or fundamentally rural.
The Savants' blood line (curiously unrepresentative of Americans generally) has gained undoubted ascendancy in the literary firmament of the US. Upper middle class, urban and cosmopolitan, they or their own species review themselves. The current Tough Guys are a murder of great, hopelessly masculine, undomesticated writers, whose critical reputations have been and still are today cruelly divergent, adrift and largely unrewarded compared to the contemporary Savant school. In literature as in American life, success must be total and contrasted "failure" fatally dispiriting.
But in both content and technical riches, the Tough Guys are the true legislators of tortured American souls. They could include novelists Thomas McGuane, William Gaddis, Barry Hannah, Leon Rooke, Harry Crews, Jim Harrison, Mark Richard, James Welch and Denis Johnson. Cormac McCarthy is granddaddy to them all. New York critics may prefer their perfidy to be ignored, comforting themselves with the superlatives for All the Pretty Horses, but we should remember that the history of Cormac McCarthy and his achievement is not an American dream but near on 30 years of neglect for a writer who, since The Orchard Keeper in 1965, produced only masterworks in elegant succession. Now he has given us his great American nightmare.
The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. Abandoning gruff but profound male camaraderie, McCarthy instead sounds the limits of imaginable love and despair between a diligent father and his timid young son, "each other's world entire". The initial experience of the novel is sobering and oppressive, its final effect is emotionally shattering.
America - and presumably the world - has suffered an apocalypse the nature of which is unclear and, faced with such loss, irrelevant. The centre of the world is sickened. Earthquakes shunt, fire storms smear a "cauterised terrain", the ash-filled air requires slipshod veils to cover the mouth. Nature revolts. The ruined world is long plundered, with canned food and good shoes the ultimate aspiration. Almost all have plunged into complete Conradian savagery: murdering convoys of road agents, marauders and "bloodcults" plunder these wastes. Most have resorted to cannibalism. One passing brigade is fearfully glimpsed: "Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. The phalanx following carried spears or lances ... and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each." Despite this soul desert, the end of God and ethics, the father still defines and endangers himself by trying to instil moral values in his son, by refusing to abandon all belief.
All of this is utterly convincing and physically chilling. The father is coughing blood, which forces him and his son, "in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep", on to the treacherous road southward, towards a sea and - possibly - survivable, milder winters. They push their salvage in a shopping cart, wryly fitted with a motorcycle mirror to keep sentinel over that road behind. The father has a pistol, with two bullets only. He faces the nadir of human and parental existence; his wife, the boy's mother, has already committed suicide. If caught, the multifarious reavers will obviously rape his son, then slaughter and eat them both. He plans to shoot his son - though he questions his ability to do so - if they are caught. Occasionally, between nightmares, the father seeks refuge in dangerously needy and exquisite recollections of our lost world.
They move south through nuclear grey winter, "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world", sleeping badly beneath filthy tarpaulin, setting hidden campfires, exploring ruined houses, scavenging shrivelled apples. We feel and pity their starving dereliction as, despite the profound challenge to the imaginative contemporary novelist, McCarthy completely achieves this physical and metaphysical hell for us. "The world shrinking down to a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true."
Such a scenario allows McCarthy finally to foreground only the very basics of physical human survival and the intimate evocation of a destroyed landscape drawn with such precision and beauty. He makes us ache with nostalgia for restored normality. The Road also encapsulates the usual cold violence, the biblical tincture of male masochism, of wounds and rites of passage. His central character can adopt a universal belligerence and misanthropy. In this damnation, rightly so, everyone, finally, is the enemy. He tells his son: "My job is to take care of you. I was appointed by God to do that ... We are the good guys." The other uncomfortable, tellingly national moment comes when the father salvages perhaps the last can of Coke in the world. This is truly an American apocalypse. The vulnerable cultural references for this daring scenario obviously come from science fiction. But what propels The Road far beyond its progenitors are the diverted poetic heights of McCarthy's late-English prose; the simple declamation and plainsong of his rendered dialect, as perfect as early Hemingway; and the adamantine surety and utter aptness of every chiselled description. As has been said before, McCarthy is worthy of his biblical themes, and with some deeply nuanced paragraphs retriggering verbs and nouns that are surprising and delightful to the ear, Shakespeare is evoked. The way McCarthy sails close to the prose of late Beckett is also remarkable; the novel proceeds in Beckett-like, varied paragraphs. They are unlikely relatives, these two artists in old age, cornered by bleak experience and the rich limits of an English pulverised down through despair to a pleasingly wry perfection. "He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms out-held for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle."
Set piece after set piece, you will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmerised with disgust and the fascinating novelty of it all: breathtakingly lucky escapes; a complete train, abandoned and alone on an embankment; a sudden liberating, joyous discovery or a cellar of incarcerated amputees being slowly eaten. And everywhere the mummified dead, "shrivelled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth".
All the modern novel can do is done here. After the great historical fictions of the American west, Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy, The Road is no artistic pinnacle for McCarthy but instead a masterly reclamation of those midnight-black, gothic worlds of Outer Dark (1968) and the similarly terrifying but beautiful Child of God (1973). How will this vital novel be positioned in today's America by Savants, Tough Guys or worse? Could its nightmare vistas reinforce those in the US who are determined to manipulate its people into believing that terror came into being only in 2001? This text, in its fragility, exists uneasily within such ill times. It's perverse that the scorched earth which The Road depicts often brings to mind those real apocalypses of southern Iraq beneath black oil smoke, or New Orleans - vistas not unconnected with the contemporary American regime.
One night, when the father thinks that he and his son will starve to death, he weeps, not about the obvious but about beauty and goodness, "things he'd no longer any way to think about". Camus wrote that the world is ugly and cruel, but it is only by adding to that ugliness and cruelty that we sin most gravely. The Road affirms belief in the tender pricelessness of the here and now. In creating an exquisite nightmare, it does not add to the cruelty and ugliness of our times; it warns us now how much we have to lose. It makes the novels of the contemporary Savants seem infantile and horribly over-rated. Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think about them. While we can.
· Alan Warner's latest novel is The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (Cape)
The Observer 26 Nov Life after Armageddon
Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a meditation on death, both of individuals and humanity, is by turns
The Road by Cormac McCarthy Picador, £16.99, pp241
If culture has a foundation stone, it must be the denial of death. Attempts to confront the void so often seem hollow. Even Philip Roth's Everyman, about the inevitable end of an averagely privileged American life, didn't quite come off, for all the author's brilliance and willpower. The imagination can't entirely pull up its roots in wish-fulfilment. Yet somehow, Cormac McCarthy's new novel, conjuring up the end not of an individual but of all humanity, feels very real. Death comes close.
A man and his young son make their slow way across a blasted landscape towards the sea. Theirs is a rodent life of hiding and scavenging. They follow the road, but sleep out of sight of it whenever they can. Other human beings have nothing to offer but cruelty and danger. The father creeps out of the boy's earshot at night when he has a coughing fit.
For all practical purposes, the world came to an end some years before in what was presumably a nuclear war, although those words are not used. The dead are unburied and thousands of mummified corpses can be seen still stuck in the tar of the roads that melted round them as they tried to escape.
The boy was not yet born then, though he was well on the way. It isn't certain that he remembers his mother. Now the sun hardly shows its face and nothing grows. The man has to explain the phrase 'as the crow flies' to his son, in the absence of crows or anything else that flies.
Without vitamin D in pill form, the boy will get rickets. There's rarely a roof over his head, so he's out in all weathers, but the sun no longer plays its part in the old bargain of outdoor lives and healthy bones. The only food to be had for the dwindling bands of survivors is tinned - and miraculously undiscovered by all the other scavengers - or else human.
The Road isn't a fable, or a prophesy, or even a tract in the manner of Shute's On the Beach. It's a thought and feeling experiment, bleak, exhilarating (in fact, endurable) only because of its integrity, its wholeness of seeing. The man pushing his shopping cart towards nothing hopeful, boxing the compass of despair, makes Brecht's Mother Courage seem downright fortunate in the choices she must make.
There's one literary figure who seems to have a copyright on desolation and futility, who wrote about last things almost from the first, Samuel Beckett. Eschatology was mother's milk to him. There's one episode in The Road which comes uncomfortably close to Beckett's style, but otherwise, McCarthy steps out of that coldly consoling shadow and dares to overturn Beckett's aesthetic choices. The Beckettian passage is one where the man and boy encounter an old man tapping his way along with a stick. He claims he knew what was coming: 'People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt [sic] believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt [sic] getting ready for them. It didnt [sic] even know they were there.' In this rare bit of a dialogue with a stranger, there's a sense of play-acting, even pleasure in the exchange of profound platitudes: 'Do you wish you would die?/ No. But I might wish I had died. When you're alive you always got that ahead of you./ Or you might wish you'd never been born./ Well. Beggars cant [sic] be choosers./ You think that would be asking too much./ What's done is done. Anyway, it's foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these.' Still, the Irish existential flavour here ('There is no God and we are his prophets') is a little strong.
McCarthy has his own idea of thrift, as he shows with his eccentric rationing of punctuation (dont, musnt, wasnt), but he reverses the linguistic parsimoniousness of the master. Beckett's late style was very pared down, but McCarthy reverts to a poetic register closer to Yeats: 'All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain,' for example. This turning back of the clock may seem irrational and even reactionary, but it has its own logic. If writing must always bear some relationship to beauty (and Beckett's has a great, mineral beauty), if you can only limit the play of connotation but not eliminate it, why bother to try? There's more bad faith in an artificial rigour than in the richness of language through which desolation filters here.
Language takes the edge off. That's obviously true of a fin de siecle-sounding sentence such as: 'By day, the banished Sun circles the Earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.' But it's also true of: 'They plodded on, thin and filthy as street addicts.' Street addicts at least have the possibility of begging from those better off. There are none now better off. It's even true of: 'He looked like something out a death camp', since the whole earth is now a death camp, one with no guards, only inmates.
In this extremity, there are more words than things, as the world shrinks down around 'a raw core of parsible entities'. This new world even fits the pattern of American pastoral - a wilderness and no women - though nature can provide no more than the occasional mushroom or some desiccated apples hidden in the dead grass of a dead orchard.
Part of the achievement of The Road is its poetic description of landscapes from which the possibility of poetry would seem to have been stripped, along with their ability to support life.
The 'sacred idiom shorn of its referents' must die in its turn, but before then, it is entitled to one last flight, like the flocks of migratory birds the man heard once in the early days of the post-world, their half-muted crankings miles above him in the bitter dark, when 'he wished them Godspeed until they were gone'.
Independent The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The unnamed travellers on the road to hell
By Ed Caesar
Sunday, 29 October 2006
Nuclear apocalypse. Cannibals scour the ashen planet for survivors. A mutilated baby roasts on a spit. Two survivors, a father and son, walk towards the sea of a desolate America looking for who knows what. Encounter despair, a little hope, more despair. All particularly rendered in Cormac McCarthy's spare, psalmic prose. Not the perfect Mother's Day gift.
Still, The Road inspires. We are watching a late flowering of a great American novelist. This is McCarthy's tenth novel, his second in quick succession, and his first set in the future. There are three others, say the Magi, in the pipeline. But for McCarthy disciples - and there are hundreds already debating the arcane details of his latest bloodfest in cyberspace - this novel will feel like a strange return: to the 1840s, and the author's scalp-hunting masterpiece, Blood Meridian.
We find "the man" and "the child" - left unnamed, and more knowable for it - journeying on a bleak earth. A recent disaster, we presume atomic, has rendered all but a few hardy souls extinct, and everywhere death lingers in brutal monochrome. The man uses his binoculars to scour the countryside for "anything of color", but finds none. He promises his child that when they have reached their destination, the sea, it will be blue. I am spoiling no man's plot by telling you the child is disappointed.
The man's life is lived in between dreams of his past existence: "rich dreams now which he was loath to wake from... He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."
For these two survivors, one born into hell, and one a remnant of an extinct planet, language has become a strange ford. The man often explains things in a pat phrase from the old world - "as the crow flies", for example - only to find the child, heartbreaking to discover, has no idea what his father is talking about. There are no birds in the new world, and the signal has lost its sign. Just as touching, though, is the boy's use of odd, learned phrases. "Warm at last," says the child. "Where did you get that?" says the man, as if it were a grubby toy brought home from school in dubious circumstances.
For all these exchanges, though, the man can not readily bring himself to explain to his son how things used to be: "he could not enkindle in the child's heart what was ashes in his own." That task is left to McCarthy, whose precision of natural imagery is, as ever, startling. "He'd watched a falcon," intones the narrator, "fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air." If The Road's descriptions of the lost world take on an implicit spirituality, there is nothing implicit about the child's role as saviour. "If he is not the word of God God never spoke," the man tells us. Meanwhile, both father and son affirm, in conversations that tend towards un- McCarthyist mawkishness, that they are "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire". The father's sense of mission is palpable: "my job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you."
Can the good guys win? The answer, unlike McCarthy's perfect nightmare, is not black and white. For all its grim imaginings, The Road's divine language carries its two entwined souls above the darkness. McCarthy continues to carry the fire.
New York Times BOOKS OF THE TIMES The Road Through Hell, Paved With Desperation By JANET MASLIN Published: September 25, 2006
In “The Road” a boy and his father lurch across the cold, wretched, wet, corpse-strewn, ashen landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. The imagery is brutal even by Cormac McCarthy’s high standards for despair. This parable is also trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare. “The Road” would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty.
Derek Shapton Cormac McCarthy THE ROAD By Cormac McCarthy.
This is an exquisitely bleak incantation — pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see.
“There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who is not honored here today,” the father says, trying to make his son understand why they inhabit a gray moonscape. “Whatever form you spoke of you were right.” Thus “The Road” keeps pace with the most enterprising doomsayers as death and desperation manifest themselves on every page. And in a perverse miracle it yields one last calamity when it seems that things cannot possibly get worse.
Yet as the boy and man wander, encountering remnants of the lost world and providing the reader with more and more clues about what destroyed it, this narrative is also illuminated by extraordinary tenderness. “He knew only that the child was his warrant,” it says of the father and his mission. “He said: if he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
The father’s loving efforts to shepherd his son are made that much more wrenching by the unavailability of food, shelter, safety, companionship or hope in most places where they scavenge to subsist.
Keeping memory alive is difficult, since the past grows increasingly remote. It is as if these lonely characters are experiencing “the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” The past has become like a place inhabited by the newly blind, all of it slowly slipping away. As for looking toward the future, “there is no later,” the book says starkly. “This is later.”
The ruined setting of “The Road” is strewn with terrible, revealing artifacts. There are old newspapers. (“The curious news. The quaint concerns.”) There is one lone bottle of Coca- Cola, still absurdly fizzy when all else is dust. There are charred corpses frozen in their final postures, like the long-dead man who sits on a porch like “a straw man set out to announce some holiday.” Sometimes these prompt the father to recall “a dull rose glow in the windowglass” at 1:17 in the morning, the moment when the clocks stopped forever.
“The Road” is not concerned with explaining what caused this cataclysm. It is more abstract than that. Instead it becomes a relentless cautionary tale with “Lord of the Flies”-style symbolic impact, marked by a dark fascination with the primal laws of survival. Much of its impact comes from the absolute lawlessness of its backdrop as it undermines the father’s only remaining certitude: that he must keep his boy alive no matter what danger befalls them. As they move down the metaphorical road of the title, father and son encounter all manner of perils. The weather is bitter, the landscape colorless, the threat of starvation imminent. There is also the occasional interloper or ominous relic, since the road is not entirely abandoned.
The sight of a scorched, shuffling man prompts the boy to ask what is wrong with him; the father simply replies that the man has been struck by lightning. Spear-carrying marchers on the road offer other hints about recent history. Groups of people are stowed away in hidden places as if they were other people’s food supply. In a book filled with virtual zombies and fixated on the living dead, it turns out that they are.
Since the cataclysm has presumably incinerated all dictionaries, Mr. McCarthy’s affinity for words like rachitic and crozzled has as much visceral, atmospheric power as precise meaning. His use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are hellish, a hint that “The Road” will ultimately be more radiant than it is punishing. Somehow Mr. McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it. This is art that both frightens and inspires.
Although “The Road” is entirely unsentimental, it gives father and son a memory to keep them moving, even if it is the memory of how and why the boy’s mother chose to die. She was pregnant when the world exploded, and the boy was born a few days after she and the man “watched distant cities burn.”
Ultimately she gave up and took a bullet: “She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.” In a book whose events are isolated and carefully chosen, the appearance of a flare gun late in the story is filled with echoes of her final decision.
The mother’s suicide is one more reason for astonishment at Mr. McCarthy’s final gesture here: an embrace of faith in the face of no hope whatsoever. Coming as it does after such intense moments of despondency, this faith is even more of a leap than it might be in a more forgiving story. It adds immeasurably to the staying power of a book that is simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear.
“The Road” offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be.
Apocalypse Now Amid fire and torment, a man and his son endure the end of the world as we know it. Reviewed by Ron Charles Sunday, October 1, 2006 THE WASHINGTON POST
THE ROAD
A Novel
By Cormac McCarthy
In Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road, the bloodbath is finally complete. The violence that animated his great Western novels has been superseded by a flash of nuclear annihilation, which also blasts away some of what we expect from the reclusive author's work. With this apocalyptic tale, McCarthy has moved into the allegorical realm of Samuel Beckett and José Saramago -- and, weirdly, George Romero.
The novel opens on a world that seems to have been demolished by the psychopaths of McCarthy's earlier fiction, as though the Judge from Blood Meridian had graduated from shotguns to atomic bombs and vented his spleen upon the entire planet. It's a shift that transforms not only the physical landscape, reduced now to barren plains of ash, but the moral landscape as well. The fear of dying, so prevalent in McCarthy's previous novels, is balanced here by the fear of surviving: "Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night."
The Road follows two of the last people on Earth, an unnamed man and his young son, as they walk through an incinerated wasteland foraging for food and hiding from gangs of starving cannibals. "The nights now only slightly less black," he writes. "By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." This marks a significant departure for McCarthy, but it's hardly a departure for apocalyptic fiction and film, which have trafficked in these dark visions for decades. Of course, McCarthy has borrowed from lowbrow forms before. Most of his works are Faulknerian transformations of dime-store Westerns; his first modern-day novel, last year's No Country for Old Men , wore the worn costumes of a drug-crime police chase.
Without its rich voice, The Road would read like a remake of "Night of the Living Dead." Indeed, as if to acknowledge that debt, the man remembers his late wife saying, "We're the walking dead in a horror film." More than once, the little boy warns his father they shouldn't go into an abandoned house, but then -- no, stop! -- they go in anyway. There are also the requisite touches of gallows humor: the delicious taste of the last Coke on Earth, the only writing that survives worldwide destruction being a billboard that reads: "See Rock City." And finally, the one-dimensional horror-flick women: Most middle-school boys have a more nuanced understanding of the opposite sex than McCarthy demonstrates in his fiction, and he does nothing to alter that impression here.
But even with its flaws, there's just no getting around it: The Road is a frightening, profound tale that drags us into places we don't want to go, forces us to think about questions we don't want to ask. Readers who sneer at McCarthy's mythic and biblical grandiosity will cringe at the ambition of The Road . At first I kept trying to scoff at it, too, but I was just whistling past the graveyard. Ultimately, my cynicism was overwhelmed by the visceral power of McCarthy's prose and the simple beauty of this hero's love for his son.
The novel is made up of several hundred isolated moments, scraps of dialogue and flashes of action. Here's a typical one that could appear anywhere in the book:
"The land was gullied and eroded and barren. The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes. Middens of anonymous trash. Farmhouses in the fields scoured of their paint and the clapboards spooned and sprung from the wallstuds. All of it shadowless and without feature. The road descended through a jungle of dead kudzu. A marsh where the dead reeds lay over the water. Beyond the edge of the fields the sullen haze hung over the earth and sky alike. By late afternoon it had begun to snow and they went on with the tarp over them and the wet snow hissing on the plastic."
These remarkable passages, like a succession of prose poems, are marked by a few flashes of terror, but we're never forced to gorge on the gore that McCarthy's most devoted fans celebrate. There's only a glimpse of the civilization-ending catastrophe itself, which took place years ago, just before the boy was born: "A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions." Afterward this single haunting vision of the early days: "People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road."
These glimpses are metered out carefully in a way that only increases the sense of terror. It's the constant potential for carnage that energizes the story -- the hell that can be spotted in the flash of lightning, a baby on a spit roasting over an open fire.
Among his thinly plotted novels, The Road is McCarthy's most thinly plotted of all, as there's literally nowhere to go, no sense in going, just the inexorable impulse to move. The plot, such as it is, comes down to this father's existential need to keep his son alive and hopeful in a world that offers no life or hope. Day after day, month after month, they're starving and freezing, pushing along a cart with the few provisions they scavenge from decrepit homes looted bare years ago. "The boy was all that stood between him and death," McCarthy writes. "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."
But against that lifeless state, the man clings to a raw faith in his mission: "My job is to take care of you," he tells his son. "I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you." With everything scraped away, the impulse to sanctify, to worship, to create meaning remains. "All of this like some ancient anointing," the man thinks after washing his son's hair in an icy dead lake. "So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them."
Concurrent with keeping his son alive is the more metaphysical challenge of sustaining his son's innate goodness while forcing him to witness the corruption of all moral behavior. "Are we still the good guys?" the boy asks in moments of confusion and shock. His father insists they are. "This is what good guys do," he tells him. "They keep trying. They dont give up." Why, then, his son asks, won't he help the stragglers they run across instead of running from them or shooting at them? "We should go to him, Papa. We could get him and take him with us. . . . I'd give that little boy half of my food." How to explain the necessity of abandoning others to certain death (or worse, in one particularly terrifying scene) while maintaining that they're "the good guys," the ones "carrying the fire"?
Under these singularly bleak conditions, the boy's nature -- his impulse to help, his anxiety about stealing others' food -- is, of course, naive. But even when fighting for their lives, his father knows that it's a naiveté inspired by the boy's goodness that makes their fight worthwhile, that allows him to resist the age-old temptation "to curse God and die."
The encounter that illumines the final moments of the novel will infuriate McCarthy die- hards who relish his existential bleakness, but the scene confirms earlier allusions that suggest the roots of this end-of-the-world story reach far past the nuclear age to the apocalypse of Christian faith. The book's climax -- an immaculate conception of Pilgrim's Progress and "Mad Max" -- is a startling shift for McCarthy, but a tender answer to a desperate prayer. ·
Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.
End of the Line After decades of stalking Armageddon's perimeters, Cormac McCarthy finally steps over the border The Village Voice Mark Holcomb Tuesday, Aug 29 2006
Have all of Cormac McCarthy's fictional odysseys been leading to this, a world blasted gray and featureless by human folly and cosmic indifference, inhabited only by pitiless predators and (arguably) lucky survivors? Or is The Road just further rumination from a man who, metaphorically or otherwise, finds himself on unrecognizable terrain in the final years of his life?
Take your pick. The genius of Mc- Carthy's work, whether you find it risible or profound, is in its bold, seamless melding of private revelation, cultural insight, and unabashed philosophizing. Sci-fi divination is new for him, though, and the freshness he brings to this end-of-the-world narrative is quite stunning: It may be the saddest, most haunting book he's ever written, or that you'll ever read.
His previous novel, No Country for Old Men, was nothing if not pre-apocalyptic, and The Road fulfills that bitter promise in spades. Its stripped-down story, however, couldn't be more removed from the doggedly elliptical No Country: A man and his young son trek southwesterly through an unnamed, nuclear-winterized landscape in search of warmth and on the run from bands of cannibalistic outlaws. As the pair scavenge for food and comfort among eerily abandoned towns and withered forests, they provide each other with—just barely—a reason not to lie down and die.
Never one to indulge in explosive action (he's more the propulsive type—"they went on" is this tale's Blood Meridian–like mantra), McCarthy holds back even more than usual here. The milieu—a sprawling, horizonless vale of drifting ash and spindly rubble, "the ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be"—is startling for its lack of customary descriptive detail, and the book is all the more wrenching for it; the degree of ruin might make even Judge Holden blanch. McCarthy underplays the familiar last-man-on-earth pulp accoutrements as well, making The Road more Time of the Wolf than Mad Max, and more Kuroi Ame than either of those (devoid of that novel's debatable reassurance that the world was more or less intact after Hiroshima's incineration).
It's also McCarthy's purest fable yet. The troubled bond that links the man, a compulsive isolationist tyrannized by his fading memories ("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"), and the boy, who longs to stop and make contact with other "good guys" on the road, is key to the book's mythic scope: Its argument exists in the tension between the rank self-centeredness necessary to survive as an individual and the altruism required to survive as a species. As such, it seems as much McCarthy's second response to the West's accelerated social erosion (the frankly bewildered No Country being the first) as a heartsick accounting of irretrievable extinction. The Road also represents a more personal reckoning, albeit a less angry one than its predecessor. Despite the apocalyptic setting, McCarthy lets down his cynical guard enough to suggest that the future—to say nothing of the present—invariably resembles a wasteland when viewed from the vantage point of someone with an abundance of past. (Not that he's lost his edge; there are plenty of robust allusions to Western lit's better-known Father and Son act here, too.) It's a gentle, compassionate gesture, and hints that this could well be McCarthy's swan song—potential bad news for his fans.
Whether or not that's the case, they should be satisfied with the current offering's characteristic helpings of hypnotic, gut-punching prose and bracing depictions of emotional longing ("She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned" )—qualities McCarthy's detractors seem bizarrely content to underestimate or overlook. Indeed, for all its allegorical underpinnings and stark grandeur, the tender precariousness of The Road's human relationships is what finally makes it such a beautiful, difficult, near perfect work.
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Words for the end of a world
By Clive Sinclair
The Independent
Friday, 17 November 2006
A score or more years ago, Anthony Rudolf published a pamphlet entitled "Byron's Darkness: Lost Summer and Nuclear Winter". He presented Byron's poem - written in 1816, the year the sun rose unseen, thanks to a Brobdingnagian volcanic eruption - as a prognostication of the coming catastrophe. Ignoring the current preference for global warming as the means to our end, Cormac McCarthy has now chosen to reprise Byron's vision of a world in which "the bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars/ Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air".
The three last words of his extraordinary new novel are "hummed of mystery". They refer to the world that has been lost, the world before Homo sapiens blundered on the scene. But they could equally well serve as the book's epitaph.
Numerous mysteries and their hum make The Road so much more than a political jeremiad. McCarthy declines to detail the immediate cause of the apocalypse. He is equally unspecific about the date of the catastrophe, though very certain of the time the clocks stopped: 1:17. Sounds a bit like a biblical reference to me.
Sure enough, it has occasioned much debate among McCarthy's more talmudic fans, who have noted that the protagonist of his previous book (No Country for Old Men ) was gunned down outside a motel room whose number was also 117. Significance, or mere coincidence?
Some think it a reference to Genesis 1:17 ("And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth"), while others favour the Book of Revelation: "And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead". I'm no biblical scholar, but I'll put my money on Exodus 1:17: "But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive".
In any event, The Road describes the efforts of a father to preserve his young son's life. "My job is to take care of you," the one tells the other. "I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you." Even so, the father depends upon his son, almost as much as his son depends upon him. When floored by despair and weakness he sees the boy "standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle".
Early on their via dolorosa, the father plucks a can of Coca-Cola (perhaps the world's last) from the entrails of a smashed dispenser. The boy (who knows not what it is) sips it ceremoniously. Since hardly anything is named, the drink is not named accidentally. But to what end? Surely not product placement. No, it is because in the lost world Coca-Cola was sold as the nation's collective tea and madeleine, as the American Dream's communion wine, its bubbles a repository of youthful memory. But, to the boy, they are just fizz. And the youthful memories he will accumulate are hellish, mediated only by a father's love. Although no political words are spoken, this quasi-religious scene is by no means apolitical.
The red can shines like a warning beacon in an otherwise grey world, a warning to those Coke-swilling horsemen of the apocalypse who anticipate the end of days and the rapture to come thereafter. Follow me, invites McCarthy, and see just what that rapture will be like.
Despite the biblical undertow, the journey that father and son undertake is unmistakably an American one: a grim re-enactment of pioneer crossings (as well as later ones by Jack Kerouac and Robert Pirsig). Instead of a covered wagon, father and son push a supermarket trolley; instead of a loyal wife and mother, there is only the memory of a woman who decamped with death; instead of dashing bandits, there are merciless cannibals who devour their own newborn, and would eat them, too, given half a chance.
As the faithless wife implies, they now inhabit the hopeless world of George A Romero, rather than the brave new one of John Ford. Yet father and son doggedly hang on to some remnant of that vanished optimism. In their minds they remain the "good guys", essentially distinct from the "bad guys". Their destination is the south, where (they hope) the freezing air may be milder.
When they eventually reach the Gulf (which turns out to be as grey and cold as everywhere else), the boy begs to be allowed to swim in it. The father's reply is worth noting. "You'll freeze your tokus off," he warns. There are plenty of obscure words in the book ("parsible", "torsional", "vermiculate") but none other of Yiddish derivation.
It's just a hunch, but I think I hear in it an echo of those heart-breaking memoirs (such as Aharon Appelfeld's) that record a feral childhood on the run from the Nazis. In short, the inhumanity of McCarthy's "bloodcults" is not unprecedented. What is different this time is that they have a made a cinder of the world, undoing the six days of creation, and making language redundant.
As the last of the good guys leads his son along the bleak southern shore, together they observe the "ashen effigies" of hydrangeas, ferns and wild orchids. When the wind has reduced them to dust, their names too will vanish from the world's diminishing store of words. Inexorably, the "sacred idiom" is being shorn of referents and so of its reality. Also gone, or going, are the "names of things one believed to be true" - not to mention the names of the main characters.
Just once the father calls out his wife's name, but we, the readers, do not get to hear it. Neither do we hear the father's name at the climactic moment when his son calls it over and over again. Nameless they remain, but some connective tissue, some deep sympathy, makes them human and knowable to us, causes us to care almost beyond bearing about their fates, and so makes us read on compulsively for fear of what might happen to them. And us.
Clive Sinclair's book about the American West, 'Back in the Saddle Again', will be published by Picador
From Times Online December 14, 2007 The Road by Cormac McCarthy After the Apocalypse, a rotten apple gives mankind an uplifting glimmer of hope Alyson Rudd
It is the ending of The Road that people talk about. As you read it, a terror unfolds. Is McCarthy taking us to the end of the road, the end of all life? Can there be a happy ending, or at least a glimmer of hope?
The Earth has been scorched and most people, animals and vegetation destroyed. A rotten apple is the cue for gratitude; it seems miraculous that it can be found under the blanket of grey dust. The two central characters, a father and son, trudge towards the coast. They encounter evil. Survivors are enslaved or stored as food. There is a fate worse than death and the father makes sure that his son knows this. Monnie Black cried, as many readers must have, but found the finale uplifting. Amid the stench of death, the fear and the anger, some do the right thing.
They maintain morality, they believe in God or, if not God, in humanity. The son is a messiah. He is young, he has not been captured and he knows what is good and what is sinful. Above all, he wants to help others in a world where most think that they have no choice but to put themselves first.
Ten things that make Cormac McCarthy special
I had no idea that The Road would be quite so moving. I settled down to read the last 30 pages wearing a face mask. What a mistake! I was supposed to keep my features still, but I twitched in sorrow. I have been recommending the book to my friends who are concerned that it sounds too sad. But I have reassured them that at the very end you feel uplifted. It is hardly a happy ending in the traditional sense but is as happy as it could be, given that the Earth has practically been burnt to a crisp. In a strange way the ending felt realistic.
The only way for mankind to struggle on would be to believe in God or to believe in the goodness of those who have died while protecting the ones they loved. The boy does not have to be religious but he does need to believe in goodness while, all around him, some choose an evil path for survival.
Monnie Black Suffolk
November 23, 2007
A haunting apocalyptic parable of a grief-stricken father and son with a message for every parent
A WRITER CAN HAVE FUN WITH THE end of the world. Will humanity be destroyed by conventional war, nuclear holocaust, hunger, plague, venomous plants, biological weapons, poisonous gas, a collision with a comet or alien invasion?
In 1894 all ways seemed possible. In Olga Romanoff, George Griffith wrote about destruction by a comet and aliens. Perhaps that seemed more plausible than global warming. Today, Griffith’s works seem almost unreadable, with their talk of “Children of Deliverance” and “the Doom of the World”. But he kick-started a genre. H. G. Wells was a fan of M. P. Shiel, whose tale of the Earth’s vulnerability to poisonous gas, The Purple Cloud, was published in 1901. Wells himself had bold visions of the future, as is demonstrated by his enduring The War of the Worlds, with its spying Martians, intent on attacking Earth.
Fiction built around the possibility of mass destruction is full of suspense. In Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Australia awaits the fallout from the Third World War to hit its shores. The dilemma is whether to face the radiation or swallow cyanide pills to avoid a long and painful death.
Now, with The Road, post-apocalyptic fiction comes full circle. For Cormac McCarthy ignores what other writers make the core of their work — he does not tell us how the world was damaged, but plunges us straight into the post-apocalyptic crisis. There are no explosions, fire-ridden skies or hurtling asteroids. All is quiet and bleak. the hungry survivors are divided into two classes — those who eat other people and those who do not.
But there is probably as much suspense as in any work contemplating the Earth’s destruction. The father and son who trudge along the road are surrounded by death and think about it always. The father occasionally sinks into despair. He cannot remember the names of colours or birds or things to eat. The odds are against them, but if mankind has any hope, they have to survive. “Are we still the good guys?” the boy asks. If not, then all is lost.
At times the tension is unbearable. The boy is nervous about the derelict houses that they search for food and shelter. Will they find a precious tin of peaches or a cellar full of people waiting to be slaughtered for meat? For McCarthy to produce poetic beauty from this vision of mass destruction is remarkable.
'McCarthy's subject is as big as it gets'
The Road was published to huge acclaim in America, winning this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Here is a selection of the reviews:
“I read this book in one take late at night and immediately headed downstairs to kick up the fire and drink some bourbon. I was cold, chilled emotionally, stunned, awestruck by McCarthy’s words. I mentioned The Road to a singer-songwriter friend and all he could say was: ‘That one put me off my feed for a few days.’ Knowing the guy as I do, I took the comment as high praise . . . Dark is dark and some of us have arcane addictions.”
John Holt California Literary Review
“McCarthy’s subject is as big as it gets: the end of the civilised world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all. He has written a visually stunning picture of how it looks at the end to two pilgrims on the road to nowhere. Colour in the world — except for fire and blood — exists mainly in memory or dream . . . McCarthy has said that death is the major issue in the world and that writers who don’t address it are not serious. Death reaches very near totality in this novel. Billions of people have died, all animal and plant life . . .”
William Kennedy The New York Times
“Many authors have imagined a post-nuclear world. McCarthy is particularly well suited because he writes so beautifully and convincingly about violence, despair and men in desperate situations . . . There are subtle references to the Bible, Greek mythology and history. But amid this Godot-like bleakness, McCarthy shares something vital and enduring about the boy’s spirit, his father’s love and the nature of bravery itself.”
Dierdre Donahue USA Today
And what The Times said: “Fiction doesn’t get much bleaker than this. Nor does it get much better.”
Tom Gatti
November 9, 2007
A haunting apocalyptic parable of a grief-stricken father and son with a message for every parent
THE ROAD WAS AWARDED THE 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is not, though, a particularly American book. In fact, it could be set almost anywhere — for the world has all but ended and few have survived.
We don't know what has happened to create Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic backdrop. My own book club decided a natural disaster had occurred. Strangely, it is the omission of detail about the catastrophe that makes the book so powerful. We join a man and his young son as they trek towards the coast. They are not in shock; they have become accustomed to the grey, sterile landscape, to the need to be invisible to avoid capture by men who have lost their humanity. They talk to each other with the economy that comes from extreme grief. There is much love but too much weariness and hunger for what would have passed for ordinary father/son chats before the earth was scorched.
The father needs his son to speak, however. He needs to know that he has not given up; that he wants to live even though there is little to live for. Every time the father asks his child what he is thinking or how he feels, there is an overwhelming sense of all the parents who have asked nothing, who have despaired and in the midst of disaster have lost even their ability to put their offspring first.
I found some pages almost unbearably distressing but did not want to skip a single word. The Road is exceptionally well written. There are moments of absolute horror and of startling beauty and its imagery will surely haunt all those privileged to read it.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy Picador, £7.99
From The Times October 28, 2006 Hope flickers, but only just review by Tom Gatti THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy Picador, £16.99; 256pp
LET’S GET ONE THING straight: this isn’t the kind of road that you want to be on. It’s not the free-loving freeway or the thrill-seeking interstate. It definitely isn’t Route 66. This kind of road is a blot of black tar smudged across a barren, ashen, landscape. A father and son travel it by foot, survivors of a nuclear holocaust that left only a scattered handful of humans standing. Others spared by the apocalypse have become savage, pagan, cannibalistic – the boy and man desperately evade them, travelling south to escape the cold, eking out an existence from the pitiful remains of a once-abundant planet and searching for some sign that they are not the only “good guys” left.
Fiction doesn’t get much bleaker than this. Nor, however, does it get much better: The Road is a work of such terrible beauty that you will struggle to look away. It will knock the breath from your lungs.
McCarthy’s writing is often preoccupied with man’s capacity for violence: from All the Pretty Horses, where the hero must come to terms with his own ability to inflict harm, to No Country for Old Men, where the arrival of an utterly amoral killer heralds the decline of an honourable way of life. But here the biggest act of violence is to the earth, which, in McCarthy’s poetical, mythic prose, becomes a scarred human body, a “cauterized terrain” which the grey daylight “congeals over”.
Each night the light recedes, leaving nothing but a palette of blacks to paint with: a “cold autistic dark”, “black as the cellars of hell”; a blackness “to hurt your ears with listening”. When the father and son reach the ocean, it is “like a slowly heaving vat of slag”, and in a blackly comic moment the father apologises: “I’m sorry it’s not blue”.
“The boy” and “the man” (as they are referred to throughout) are condemned to a Beckettian existence of sustained suffering. There are no palliatives: the father cannot “construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well”, so their conversation is confined to the grim present. The boy still has faith in a shadowy God, and when they find a flare gun he fires it so that He might see where they are. But all the man’s faith is staked on his son, and in his eyes the child becomes a messiah figure, his “warrant” for continuing when every day death beckons.
They are “carrying the fire”, he tells the boy, and this is the glowing heart of the novel: the fierce, mutually protective love between father and son. Watching the boy sleep at night, the man sobs uncontrollably because he sees beauty and goodness but no longer has “any way to think of them”. But crucially, they still exist: McCarthy has stripped his characters of every comfort, code and guide, and, miraculously, a seed of humanity remains. Whether it can grow in such sterile earth is another question.
Having destroyed your faith in humankind with one hand and restored it with the other, The Road hums on in the background; a moving and terrifying vision of a world that we can either keep as fantasy, or pull slowly, fatally, into reality.