The Road, A

A 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy

With Cormac McCarthy’s novels increasingly finding their way to the big screen, most notably in last year’s Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, but previously with All the Pretty Horses, I decided it was time to give him a read. Pulitzer Prize winner The Road, currently filming and starring Viggo Mortenson, Charlize Theron, Guy Pierce, and Robert Duvall, seemed like a reasonable place to start.

What I found in the reading was a stark, tragic, and brutally beautiful novel that unflinchingly explores the absolute good and absolute evil in us all. Set in a post-apocalyptic America, the story traces a father and son’s slow walk south in search of food, warmth, and hope. The time is a number of years after the circumstances (war?) that have left the whole of America burned out, depositing a constantly falling layer of ash everywhere and leaving no living animals or plants. They survive on the few canned foods that have been missed by earlier scavengers. Shortly after the apocalypse, when it became obvious that food was gone, most remaining humans formed cannibalistic bands to procure the protein needed for survival by raging against each other. The stomach-turning passages of the man’s attempt to protect his son from both the clutches and the reality of these groups haunts me still. While the father is leading them south in the hope of finding other decent humans, it’s obvious he’s been far too shaped by the hunt to ever trust enough to make contact, leaving the boy to consider a truly solitary existence should the father die.

The Road is a triumph of form creating meaning. The haunting prose is Hemingway-esque in its utility and lack of flourish, differing from Ernest only in the inclusion of occasional haunting metaphors. Everything superfluous has been stripped from the writing, including proper names, chapter divisions and any punctuation marks save the period. While it is bleak, there is also such great love and, ultimately, hope, that this reader was moved to tears on several occasions. As the boy asks his father to explain again why they’re the good guys (people that don’t eat other people) and to assure him that they’ll never be the bad guys (people that do), the necessity of a lived-out ethic becomes apparent. And when the father tells the boy that he is the keeper of the flame, that the father can see it in the boy’s eyes, and that he can’t let that flame go out, that gets to the very heart of the relationships that ultimately define us. A