Cormac McCarthy’s fiction has always possessed an apocalyptic edginess—so who can be surprised that he finally wrote a novel about end times. Or that he seems so much at home in the bleak and ominous landscapes of a dying planet Earth? His post-Armageddon setting for The Road , from one perspective, is merely an extension of the violent, inhospitable borderlands he has been writing about for decades
You can tell a lot about writers from whether their eschatology comes with a bang or a whimper. For Cormac McCarthy there is only a long, drawn-out and anguished grinding to a halt. There is no Rapture in this author's vision of the final days: everyone is left behind here. Except, those who are already dead before the narrative starts—and, McCarthy hints, they may be the most fortunate of them all.
A man and his son are struggling for survival in the aftermath of some devastating cataclysm. McCarthy offers few details of the events that led to this situation. His reticence on this account is surprising, when one considers the other writers who have used the depiction of dark future times as a springboard for political commentary. Whether George Orwell or Ayn Rand, Margaret Atwood or Aldous Huxley, the prognosticators have pretended to talk about the future, when their real interest is in offering incisive commentary on their present day society. Yes, 1984 is a book about 1948, as becomes all the clearer with the passage of time. Brave New World is, among other things, a guide to a now departed world, whose naive positivism we can hardly imagine nowadays. But McCarthy not only resists the temptation to offer a political angle to his book—he even seems blissfully unaware that this is even an option open to him.
Everything in this book happens on an immediate, personal level. You are free to draw your own sociological lessons from it, construct your own theology, puff up your own ideology—but that will be your contribution, not the author’s. McCarthy keeps focused on the predicament of his protagonists, and never lets the reader escape into the theoretical. And that is the source of this book’s unrelenting power. The Road , for all its brilliance, is one of the most agonizing books you will ever read. It kept me squirming in my seat, when I read it—almost every page made me distinctly uncomfortable.
Yet I couldn’t put this book down. Long before fiction learned to philosophize, it focused its energies on circumscribing the most basic elements of the human condition. The history of story-telling, from the Iliad to the last episode of Lost , is a series of “what ifs.” People have always been attracted to stories of ordinary individuals thrust into extraordinary circumstances. McCarthy pushes this convention to the limits. His father and son can take nothing for granted—food, shelter, health, physical safety—and the surrounding anarchy suggests that anyone else they encounter will be looking to kill, maim, enslave, or perhaps even cook them up for supper.
And then there is the journey. This is another staple of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, populated by restless characters who constantly head off into the unknown—an unknown that, given this author’s dark vision, is typically worse than the lousy place they just left behind. In The Road his protagonists set out to the south, in the direction of the sea. Here they hope to find some remnant of civilization, perhaps a healthier climate, or an more stable and secure environment.
The Road has found a surprisingly enthusiastic audience given its foreboding and, at times, gruesome sensibility. It won the Pulitzer, made it into Oprah’s book club, and was placed by Entertainment Weekly at the top of a list of the best books of the last 25 years. Entertainment Weekly ? If this is entertainment, I think I will trade in my big screen TV for a long stint in solitary confinement. This gripping novel will force readers outside their comfort zones, and ultimately succeeds without making even the smallest concession to the formulas of escapist fiction.
Everything in this book serves to accentuate its bleak tone. The prose is harsh, with few flourishes to soften the reader’s progress. The dialogue is choppy and utilitarian. The landscape—always important in setting the atmosphere in McCarthy’s books—hardly more inviting than a battlefield or the dark side of the moon.
But even in this bitter world, a few noble things remain: a shred of conscience, a willingness for self-sacrifice, the pull of blood ties, a struggle for survival. They are intangibles, of course; nothing you can take to the bank or eat for supper. But McCarthy—and this is his great achievement here—shows how fiercely we hold on to our personal metaphysics even after we have left everything else behind. Not many novels force us to confront such matters— certainly not in the raw and bleeding manner that Cormac McCarthy does. For that reason, I suspect that The Road will continue to mesmerize readers long after more compact tales of apocalypse, with their neat political commentaries and helpful hints for legislators, have fallen out of favor.