Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Books Reviewed
Whoa. Heavy, man.
That’s my basic reaction to The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
It took me a long time to get around to reading this book because I saw the movie first. I hate reading books after I see the movie. I mean, I already know what happens in the end. Worst spoiler ever. However, I still enjoyed this book tremendously, which I think speaks to McCarthy’s great prose.
I love his spare language and his landscape descriptions and his dialog and his metaphors and… well, you get the idea.
Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
I could really turn to any page and find something beautiful to copy down.
As for the narrative, this is the darkest book I have ever read, in both the sense of the content and the imagery. And I’ve read a lot of dystopian books. I love dystopia. I spent most of my twenties living in Alaska preparing for the apocalypse. However, while reading this book, I kept trying to convince myself (and my husband) that it could never go down this way. What about wind energy? Or geothermal? Isn’t the human race more resourceful than this?
Plausibility aside, this story really rocks a human down to their very meat and bones. It speaks of such intense desperation and visceral fear. The whole book was a journey spent staying just barely alive. The man and the boy, his son, nameless and faceless fading bodies and spirits wandering through a cold and ashen landscape of darkness, hiding from cannibals, fighting off sickness, scavenging for food, only able to stay warm if it is safe enough to light a fire. The man is dying. The boy will be left alone to fend for himself. It is so hopeless that even the smallest find, a cache of food or a blanket, is a momentary victory.
Yet the man has instilled a sense of morality in an immoral world into his son. There are good guys and bad guys and they are the good guys. Also, they carry the light.
We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not.
Even if we were starving?
We’re starving now.
You said we werent.
I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving.
But we wouldnt.
No. We wouldnt.
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys.
Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire.
And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.
Okay.
Of course, the fire is never explained to us, but it is a concept that a child can grasp. The inextinguishable flame. Buried inside. Unseen. Known only by those who carry it. The light of hope.
Don’t get me wrong, hope or no hope, this book is depressing. Up late one night, unable to put the book down, I read the most gruesome scene. I finally had to close it because I could not keep my eyes open. Once the lights were out, and my eyes were shut, I found myself playing the scenarios in my head, only I was the man and my daughter was the boy. I kept considering how I would protect her. What would I do? How could I live like that knowing that she might be attacked, killed, eaten? I was overcome with terrible anxiety and worried about every little thing from whether or not I locked the front door to what I would do if there was an earthquake. (There hasn’t been an earthquake in New Mexico since 1973.) I couldn’t help it. The darkness had sucked me in.
Maybe this is a sign of a good book. On the other hand, why would anyone want to read a book that induces irrational fears? Apparently, I would, since I lapped the whole thing up in a couple of days.
The best part is that The Road has a “happy” ending. Yes, I had to place happy in quotes because happy is relative in this case. It is relatively happy. It could have been a lot worse. I was left with a sense of hope, as much hope as one can have in a nuclear winter. The fire still burned.
