The Road Less Traveled? Better The Road Never Traveled.
The Road-Cormac McCarthy
I’ve been putting off writing a review of this book for some time now. It is not that it isn’t a good book-in fact it may be a great book, one of the best written in this young century and millennium.
But the fact is I do not like mentally revisiting the world of The Road. It is a harsh and unforgiving place, and is a meditation on what is truly the worst and the best in humankind. The best is there in acts and words of kindness, love, and beauty. The worst is there in acts and words of wanton cruelty and barbarity.
If you have read other books by Cormac McCarthy you will already be aware that his outlook is, to be brief, bleak. The murderous loner in Child of God, the lonely and lost cowboys of the Plains trilogy, and the apocalyptic gang of mercenaries-cum-outlaws in Blood Meridian are all inhabitants of the world that has reached its culmination in The Road.
The Road centers on the travels of a nameless man and and his young son as they wander what appears to be a post-nuclear exchange United States. The world is locked in the grip of the much debated “nuclear winter”, and there is very little life of any kind-human, animal, plant-left. The bare necessities of living-food, water, clothing, shelter-are almost impossible to come by, and can only be found by incessant scavenging of every home, shop, and building left standing. The road of the title refers to the highways that our hapless pair follow as they look for some surviving community that has maintained the minimum standards of civilized behavior.
Because for the most part, civilized behavior is a thing long blown away, like the grey ash that constantly fills the air of this strange new world. The man and the boy may be the last civilized people left in the world. Their journey consists in part of hiding whenever they encounter strangers, trying to determine if they will be welcomed as fellow survivors or as a new source of protein. Cannibalism is a very real thing among the desperate survivors of the nuclear exchange.
I told you it was bleak.
Yet among the ruins there are moments of mercy, of kindness, of humanity. The man tries desperately to protect the innocence of his son, and of course in this world there is ultimately no way he can. He is also trying to teach him what he needs to know to survive, and the balance between innocence lost in the face of doing what is required to live is an ever present theme of The Road.
As you read The Road the hint of the ending is all to clear, and I suppose is some of why it affected me so deeply. I don’t want to give it away, but it centers on the meaning of being a parent. My own son is only a little older than the child at the heart of The Road, and the ending brings painful consideration of what the final task of a parent is.
Again, if you have read other books by McCarthy you will already be familiar with the quality of the prose in The Road. The poetic liquidity of his language and what it invokes only serve to heighten the elegiac tone of The Road. Consider this passage
“The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes."
The English language as it can shaped only by the hands of a master craftsman.
So take the long, slow walk of The Road. You may not like what you find along the way, but at the end of the journey you may find yourself understanding what it is that makes us human and what keeps back the darkness a bit better. This, to my mind, is what the best literature does-imparting some wisdom about the human condition. And the human condition, good and bad, light and dark, is what is at the center of The Road.
