“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy
Thursday, January 7th, 2010Long recommended by online literary friends VT and Steph, I finally got around to The Road by Cormac McCarthy. My husband G. Grod read it recently and thought it good, not great. I was interested to see where I’d fall on the continuum.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world of ashes, a father and son follow The Road south, trying to outrun winter. They’re clad in rags, carrying knapsacks and pushing a shopping cart of their few prized and necessary possessions. They’re cautious and alone, hoping for other pilgrims like themselves, but mostly encountering thieves and cannibals.
They plodded on, thin and filthy as street addicts. Cowled in their blankets against the cold and their breath smoking, shuffling through the black and silky drifts. They were crossing the broad coastal plain where the secular winds drove them in howling clouds of ash to find shelter where they could. Houses or barns or under the bank of a roadside ditch with the blankets pulled over their heads. and the noon sky black as the cellars of hell. He held the boy against him, cold to the bone. Dont lose heart, he said. We’ll be all right. (177)
Utterly dark in tone and description, the characters yet carry within something that the man and boy refer to as the fire. The landscape is burned and ashen; the sun does not penetrate. Food is only to be found by scavenging scraps from the old, forgotten world. The relationship between the two, McCarthy’s dazzling, often-dizzying language, and the ever-present dread of starvation or worse–all kept me reading quickly through the book, and loath to put it down.
I felt it profound, moving, terrifying, and terrifically sad. I was impressed by McCarthy’s skill with words, the relentless momentum of the story, and by the empathy he generated with two characters, lightly sketched with a sure hand. Quite wonderful, I thought. I have no wish to see the movie; I think it could only diminish the experience of the book.