The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy, the skilled writer of savage prose, is a difficult read. It's always with some trepidation that I pick up another one of his books, aware that while I read him I will delve into the bones of human existence: death, pain, dying, deception, and most of all uncertainty. As a reader, I can grapple with the first four, but the looming uncertainty forces me to examine my life. Are my values intact? What would I give up in the most extreme circumstances? I'm winded by his novels. The pace is relentless, the mood is somber tinged with desperation, and the desire seems elusive.

McCarthy's images of murder and carnage are disturbing, but they are not unimaginable. For as hellish as they may be, they are in our subconscious-- stored away, the result of living in a world imbued with violence and tragedy. Like it or not, every hellish description that the writer comes up with is taken from the real world --and if this is horrific, it ought to be.

In each of his books the uncertainty sweeps across the horizon. As a reader, this can be disconcerting, we want to know where things stand. But in our own lives, we rarely do, often couching these gaps in either philosophical or beautiful images and language.

But in his book "The Road," McCarthy does none of that. The marvel is how he tells the story truthfully, straightforward and without flinching. This is how it is, he seems to be writing. This brutal, senseless bombed out world where the only thing that propels the characters is trust. A man and a boy walk together pushing a cart of dwindling food and supplies to the coast. It is America, burned out, bombed out, where humanity is divided into the bad guys who are everywhere and the good guys, who they have yet to find. What drives them to find good guys, is their hope, their faith that out there goodness prevails. The imagery cuts like a steel blade, and perhaps more than ever, McCarthy spares no one his apocalyptic visions. Dead bodies, burnt out shells of houses, roving gangs with weapons and slaves, murderous adults who eat children. McCarthy just isn't telling a story, he's issuing a warning.

But it just isn't an allegory about the hopelessness of war, rather it's the tale of what happens after all the wars have been waged, of the nightmares of a society remaking itself into one even more brutal than the one they emerged from. But it is also about keeping faith in one's journey, of believing that good will triumph over evil. Love, trust and truth, and more importantly keeping these values amid the most impossible odds one can imagine. Where McCarthy excels is in the creation of the two characters: man and boy are also father and son. Their existence is marginal, yet they have such inner strength that we are compelled not only to follow, but to care for them. And yet it happens again, the unsettling questioning as I finish the book: could this happen? And the answer is, yes, in many ways, it already has.

The Cormac McCarthy Society
Red Planet: The sanguinary sublime of Cormac McCarthy (The New Yorker)