Tag Archives: Cormac McCarthy

A second round of “The Road”

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I simply have to come back to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I read the book over Christmas and talked about it in an earlier post and now I’m re-reading it (which is unusual for me, since I like to move immediately from the Read to the Unread). On this second round, I already know the story — a man and a boy trying to survive in a bleak and ruined landscape — and I know the turns and twists of plot (such as it is) and I know the ending. With those matters in my mind, I can sink into the language. I see nuances I’d missed.

I don’t know how McCarthy does it. Here’s the same ashen world described over and over but you never feel he’s repeating himself. Even the ubiquitous color “gray” seems newly revealed in its grayness at every turn, and I realize what’s happening is “the triumph of language over nothingness,” as the Chicago Tribune’s review put it. Or maybe it’s even better put by an experience of the man in the book:

There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness.

I’m not sobbing as I read, but the ache in me is the same, and I’m not sure what it’s about either, but I think it has to be this beauty of words, this resilient and scavenged goodness of story.

Cormac McCarthy

 

There’s a biblical sensibility here as well, due perhaps to the author’s Catholic childhood and education, and though McCarthy said, in an interview he gave Oprah, that the novel is just about that man and that boy on the road, but people draw all kinds of conclusions from reading. Yes, and it’s okay that we do. I hear a riff on Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) and  discover a catalogue of rituals that sustain the soul: eating together, the man tousling the boy’s hair “like some ancient anointing,”and telling “old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them.”

As you can tell, I like this book a lot. I know I’ve come to it later than many folks, but if you haven’t read it yet either, I’d certainly recommend that you do. 

 


On “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

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It was published in 2006, and I recalled of it only its central image as gleaned from reviews: a man and a boy trudging through a bleak post-apocalyptic world, pushing a shopping cart with all they own inside it. But now The Road has become a movie and it seemed urgent to finally read the book. I needed to let the author create the story in my mind before the filmmaker would.

Having done so this past week, I can only echo the praise lavished on this Pulitzer Prize winner. I did find the style somewhat jarring at first, McCarthy’s way of mixing complete and incomplete sentences inconsistent it seemed to me, but soon he had settled into something that worked better, or maybe I had simply settled into his language and cadence, caught up in the daily and wearisome journey of the two protagonists in that place beyond cataclysm, with its “creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland” and “the banished sun circl[ing] the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp,” the long trudge broken by reprieves of food and warmth, but mostly defined by cold and hunger and suspense — a constant undercurrent of menace, the cannibal “bad guys” near, their evil intimated in horrors like the remains of an infant on a spit.

When I was done it, the story nagged at me as a parable does, with both understanding and confusion. Yes, I see, I do see, but what am I to know from this? What does it really mean? 

For me, as for many readers, the heart of the work is the relationship between the man and the boy — father and son. I loved their exchanges, cryptic but revealing, like outcroppings of love in the pervasive silence of the ashen desolation around them. Each occupies the positions one might expect of their roles as parent and child — the protective, reassuring father and the fearful, dependent child — and yet what makes these unnamed characters so resonant for me is that they don’t stay at stereotype or expectation. Each moves between wisdom and fear the way all humans will, regardless of role. The man is as needy as a child; he is often fearful; he often fails to get beyond an instinctive violence in his encounters with others. The boy can be as protective as a parent; he exhibits a moral conscience that judges his father’s actions; he grasps responsibility. When he is heartbroken over his father’s leaving a thief naked and robbed of everything, essentially to die, the man says, “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything,” and the boy says, “Yes I am. I am the one.”

The story seems a parable to me of being human — as parent or child — but engaged in the reciprocity and mutuality each generation in their humanness must experience with the other.  

“Don’t read [this book] now if you are feeling particularly fragile, especially if you are a parent,” said British writer Victoria Glendinning in this past Saturday’s Globe and Mail, choosing The Road as her pick for “book of the decade.” I’d advise quite the opposite, however. I think The Road is a book well suited for parental fragility and fears. Children know so much more than we realize, and we as parents often so much less. We must help each other through the ashes of what happens. We can’t ever really protect each other in a world so utterly unsafe (be it future, or the one we occupy now), except for the enduring safety of love. But we can love, can’t we?