Cormac McCarthy’s novels have always visited
bleak places. From whitetrash Tennessee to the sere border landscape of
southern Texas, New Mexico and Arizona and across the border into Chihuahua,
Sonora and Coahuila, his taciturn, largely unlikeable, often sociopathic
protagonists chased fate and lived ragged lives like puppets manipulated by an
unseen hand.
In his new book,
The Road
, he takes on nothing less than the end of mankind and somehow
manages to imbue it with a humanity almost unknown is his previous work.
Anyone who grew up during the Cold War and
claims to have never wondered about what a post-apocalyptic world might be like
is either an imbecile or a liar. But thoughts of that world, and more
particularly surviving in it, rarely developed very far; it was unimaginable.
McCarthy vividly imagines it as a bleak,
barren, utterly dead place. A nuclear winter of ashen sky, gunmetal grey
landscape and dim light, the world — or what’s left of it — is cold
and inhospitable. Not much is left that hasn’t been looted and nothing is
growing; there is no sign of rebirth or renewal. The land and oceans are dead
and so, nearly, are the few inhabitants who wander, searching for food,
avoiding the murderous slave gangs and trying, for no discernable purpose other
than a stubborn will to survive, to keep from becoming food themselves.
The Road traces the wanderings of a father and
son headed for what they hope will be a warmer place to survive yet another
winter. Reflecting the lifelessness all around them, McCarthy never names his
protagonists; they are simply the man and the boy. Born shortly after the
apocalypse to a mother who chose suicide in the face of hopelessness, the boy
has never known another world and the man can never forget what things were
like before….
Before what? McCarthy dodges the inertia of
detail of what, how, when, and who unleashed the four horsemen. As close as he
comes to actually describing what happened to turn the world to ash comes late
in the book when he briefly describes the buildings of a coastal city, “…the
cluster of tall buildings vaguely askew. He thought the iron armatures had
softened in the heat and then reset again to leave the buildings standing out
of true. The melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a
cake.”
It’s a clever dodge, putting the reader into
the life and soul of the characters’ survival. In that time and place, what
does it matter how the world came to an end? Place, nation, ideology, religion
retain no meaning in the ashen remains.
Ten years after the event, the man and boy
wander on, starving, dying, a few possessions pushed along in a scavenged
shopping cart. Questionable scrounged food, tainted water, a pistol with too
few bullets to end the suffering for both of them and an arc of remaining
humanity are all that protect them from starvation, marauding gangs, and their
own despair.
For all of it’s bleakness,
The Road
is quite possibly the most tender and ultimately optimistic of
McCarthy’s sweeping works of fiction. It plumbs the uniquely human mechanisms
of hope in the face of hopelessness, trust, familial love, empathy and the
great depth of spirit that in more normal settings elevate the best of humanity
above the animal instincts that dominate the nightly news and, undoubtedly, led
to its fictional destruction.
Never a mainstream writer — but certainly one with a cultish following — McCarthy may have penned his most powerful work in this slim novel.
