The Road

 

There are quite a few apocalyptic stories: On the Beach, I Am Legend, The Stand, Oryx and Crake, Station Eleven; the list goes on. In them, the world parishes by nuclear fallout, disease, climate disaster; it burns, it drowns, it bakes, it starves. It matters not, in this genus, how it dies that fascinates; it is how we cope during its dying.

This one, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road, is fascinating in that regard. It details the journey of a father and son, unnamed, travelling south to the sea. Where they began their journey is as undisclosed as their names. So too is the method by which the world is dying. All we know is that their world is by all accounts dead, burned and blackened, adrift in black soot that shifts underfoot, its sky as grey and colourless as the bleached buildings they pass. It’s perpetually twilight. Choking. Dust, kicked up, takes its good time settling. Perpetually astir. No amount of rain cleans the air. It remains acrid and gritty, regardless how much falls from the relentless blanket of clouds that all but block out the sun and moon. The man coughs, despite his always wearing a rag mask to filter out the soot, its inner face as bloody from his breath as the outer is black by what it can never wholly hope to filter. The boy fares better; perhaps because the man tends to his every want and need, abstaining his own comfort and safety, even his own sustenance, in hope that his child will survive, even if he, himself, may already be doomed. Food is scarce, starvation always mere days away. Far more immediately dangerous, however, are the gangs of murderous maneaters roaming the same roads they do.

Have I enticed you to read this masterpiece? Probably not. How can you read something like that, you ask? But you should. McCarthy paints a far more vivid picture than any other who’ve approached the same canvas. J.G. Ballard attempted a similar desperate world in The Drought, albeit his was as sunburnt and dry as McCarthy’s is duskish and wet. But where both depict desperation in what appears to be the end-of-days, Ballard’s prose does not reek of it like McCarthy’s does. Cannibalism is hinted at in The Drought, whereas in The Road it is held up to the light. In The Drought, the cast of characters retain the semblance of civilisation, despite their need. Their presumed cannibalism does not horrify; indeed, one character has grown fat on it, yet remains altogether amiable to its protagonist. Not so in The Road. Predatory humans prowl the road, armed with homemade mediaeval weapons. Their slaves haul waggons, are locked in cellars, their amputated limbs cauterised to keep the meat alive for perhaps weeks of judicious paring. The victims are as dehumanised as their wardens. It’s all terribly horrifying. Yet our glimpse of these horrors is sparing. The true horror remains the landscape, and impending starvation. The man and the boy subsist on what can be scavenged: canned food, scrapings of seeds and flour and cornmeal, all of it suspect until ingested. The fatigue of hunger looms over them. As does injury and infection. Perhaps the greatest horror of all, though, is the hopelessness of their seemingly pointless journey.

Why are they headed south? The man tells the boy that it will be better down there. It will be warmer. He does not outwardly suggest that there will be more food – he knows that there won’t be. It is implied, however. How can there be? The world is burnt, after all. It remains unchanged, no matter how many miles and months they travel. If anything, it gets darked. Colder. Snowier. And wetter. I suspect the only reason they are headed south is because all hope had been depleted from wherever it is they began from, and to give the boy hope.

I will leave their fate undisclosed. Being a McCarthy novel, it is as painful and uncertain as all his are. But, it's a beautiful book, nonetheless, despite its bleak narrative. It is striking in its style. Its prose is as terse as Hemingway’s, succinct, sharp. Its grammar is explicitly McCarthy’s. His use of contractions is not what I would call conventional. He disdains dialogue punctuation. Dialogue is terse, seemingly pointless, yet pregnant with emotion. There is stream of consciousness. Sentence fragments. It does take a moment to get accustomed to, but it is always clear, as Faulkner’s (similarly stylistic, to my eye) rarely is to me.

This might be McCarthy’s best novel (I’ve not read them all, so take this with a grain of salt). I’m not saying this because The Road won the Pulitzer Prize, I’m saying this because I found it the most horrifying and emotionally gripping of all his that I’ve read.