THE ROAD
By Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a book that marks the end of something.
Most obviously it's a book about the end of the world as we know it. It follows
the adventures of "the man" and "the boy" as they travel
along a road that cuts through an unnamed American landscape covered in the dirty ash of nuclear
winter. They're cold, hungry, and on the run from the kinds of wasteland punks familiar to fans of the Mad Max films:
An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of
pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. Some of the pipes were
threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of
bludgeon. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys.
Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. . . . The phalanx following
carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of
trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry. . . . Tramping. Behind them came
wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the
women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a
supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in
dogcollars and yoked each to each.
I invoke Mad Max for several reasons here. In the first place because, as
I've argued before, McCarthy is a profoundly cinematic writer both in terms of
style and subject matter. One simply cannot imagine the Judge in Blood
Meridian without seeing Brando's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, or the
discovery of the cash in No
Country For Old Men without being reminded of Blondie and Tuco coming
across the stagecoach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
But I also mention Mad Max because the whole post-apocalyptic film genre, of
which the Mad Max films were among the best, was a product of the 1980s (though
connoisseurs of this form of entertainment may point to 1977's Damnation Alley,
or even earlier flicks, as evidence that it had been around for a while). The
end of the world was even on television, with big productions like The Day After (1983)
and Threads (1984). My point is that, in addition to being
very fond of the movies, McCarthy also has his head stuck in the 80s. (Before
that this would have been a better book, as it in fact was in 1968's Outer
Dark.) This fixation is something I addressed in my review of No Country For Old Men
- a novel set in the 80s - and it's worth keeping in mind here. The Road is not a
nightmare vision of the future, but a dream of apocalypses past.
Nuclear war, at least of the kind imagined here, was a 1980s anxiety.
Nowadays when we imagine the end of the world we tend to think in terms of some
kind of plague or natural catastrophe (cue more film footage, this time from The Day After
Tomorrow). So The Road is definitely a throwback
to previous ends of the world. It is not, as it has been interpreted, a response
to post-9/11 or post-Katrina America. Its only political dimension is Cold War
good vs. evil, us vs. them, the "carriers of the fire" vs. the "bloodcults."
And its closest literary cousins, like its drive-in movie origins, are pop trash: the Left
Behind series and Stephen King's The Stand.
This may sound like I'm being unduly harsh on what is, after all, a ripping
good yarn. But for a writer of McCarthy's reputation I feel some need to calm
the discussion down a bit. In the first place, I'm feeling a lot less impressed
these days when he steps into his oracular yet cornpone philosophy, registered in what
are usually, and I think somewhat lazily, described as "Biblical
cadences" (e.g., "The snow fell nor did it cease to fall"). I
mean, of course, passages like this:
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A
blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but
the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that
cold autistic dark with this arms outheld for balance while the vestibular
calculations in this skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To
seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great
marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes
closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or
matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum
in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which
you may say it knows nothing and yet it must know.
I like this as writing, especially the way it starts out with the ears
hurting to listen and the "autistic dark," but the rest of it seems to
be windy and overblown. Is that the Foucault's pendulum in the rotunda of the UN building? Is all
of this hooey, in the end, just an evocation of gravity? Is that all that's
meant by the "old chronicle . . . to seek out the upright"? And this,
I might add, is when McCarthy's at his best. Elsewhere one learns to expect regular
time-outs for what is merely verbal upholstery:
Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak
and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless
and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark
beyond.
Now as a matter of fact, I think this is great. But what I mean by that is
that it's great shit. Some readers have found existential or spiritual messages in The Road, but I am sure they are deluded. There is no more significance or
meaning to any of the undeniably effective and unforgettable scenes in this book
(the discovery of the humans being kept for food in the cellar, the remains of
the baby brochette) than you will get out of one of Romero's living dead films.
And those movies are a far from invalid analogy. Romero's cannibal nightmares
really are commentaries on such subjects as race, class, and
consumerism. For all its linguistic and narrative skill, The Road
signifies what?
Yes, there is skill on display. The dialogue, as always, is wonderful. The characters
have their usual archetypal strength (though this time there are no interesting
villains). The variations in voice, alternating between exactly described
mechanical operations like fixing the wheel on the shopping cart and the
aforementioned invocations of a nameless otherwhere, are smooth as butter. Some
things stick out as problems. One has trouble imagining a shopping cart being
pushed through snowy woods, for example. The ending is, oddly for McCarthy, an
unbelievable stretch into feel-good territory. And leaving out the apostrophe is
fine, but why then retain "it's"? As in "I dont know. But it's
okay now." I'm not sure what principle is being insisted on by keeping the
apostrophe in this one case and not in any other. Grammar and sense have already
been sacrificed on the altar of sound.
And so we come to the end . . . of something. At bottom this is a book for fourteen year-old
boys, and I'm not sure where McCarthy can go from here. A career that has
devolved into writing stylish literary novelizations of spaghetti westerns and
zombie films may have run its course.
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but in pop fiction.
Notes:
Review first published online January 8, 2007. What looks like a plain black jacket design is actually another
creation of genius from Chip Kidd. I mean, just look at how artfully he's
arranged the title and the author's name!
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