In this book, it’s a fate worse than death. Few will read it without a worry for the world they inherit. Few will read The Road without running to their own children and holding them close. It is the tense chord of the lost child suspended in your heart, the worst thing about to happen, and McCarthy strums it again and again. This accentuates The Road’s impressionistic power, adding to its rhythm, as if the book were not composed of sections but stanzas in a poem, the metaphysical footsteps of his characters, beat by beat in a terrible dream.Įvery time father or son moves more than a few feet away from each other, a panic intrudes as you read. Structurally, McCarthy also maintains the pace by keeping each scene barely more than a paragraph long. But there’s a momentum that pulls you on nonetheless, a momentum that might partly be identified as hope. Ten pages into this book, I was depressed, even troubled by its tone. In this world, of course, there is no God but for McCarthy, and his authorial eye holds little joy for where we are headed as a species. McCarthy cultivates a chill in you with those words, and with it an echo of Abraham’s plight in the Bible when God demanded his son as a sacrifice. Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?” It is soon established what the father must do if they are in danger of being captured. But the fretful tenderness and constant fear gives animal urgency to their long march. Neither the man nor the boy is given a name. “The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.” Everywhere is burnt and grey, marked with ash. They move by foot, pushing a cart, scavenging through empty houses and destroyed cities, eluding gangs reduced to cannibalism and sub-human madness. We follow father and son as they travel toward the coast, fleeing the onset of winter. An end-of-the-world misery causes him to reflect “each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.” The father, later unable to sleep, lies “awake in the dark with the uncanny taste of peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mind.” Most of The Road is his story. These events and others are glimpsed in truncated flashbacks, startling images that play on the mind. Soon after a woman gives birth to a son before she goes blind from radioactive poisoning and walks off to commit suicide. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” McCarthy’s delivery of The Road barely one year later puts paid to that idea in spades as he unloads the tale of a man and his son stumbling through a post-apocalyptic landscape that might once have been America: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. It nonetheless added to malcontent amongst hard core fans who felt the old man was going soft, crowd pleasing, cleaning up his grim act for the popcorn theatres. No Country for Old Men, the tale of a drug deal gone wrong, just moved at a faster, leaner clip than his older books, turning McCarthy’s war horse into a hot rod. Given how foreboding McCarthy is, even his supposedly lightweight stuff is tough enough to wind most readers badly. It too became a best seller and was optioned for film rights by the Coen Brothers. Last year’s No Country For Old Men (2005), a genre thriller set, unusually for him, in the present, was similarly canned as McCarthy-Lite. Devotees turned away, calling it too sentimental. But it wasn’t till All the Pretty Horses (1992) that he reached the best-seller lists. The literary critic Harold Bloom acclaimed McCarthy on its release as one of America’s foremost important living writers alongside Don DeLillo, Phillip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. A psychotic dream across the page, Sam Peckinpah meets William Faulkner, its writing felt more like lava than language. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) was high noon for this. To live in Cormac McCarthy’s world is to certainly know death in all its manifestations: from nature and wolves to man-made acts of evil or necessity, when good men do bad things to survive. So much so that you could say most of his books are about what it means to be a man – and if, in becoming a man, tenderness can survive? That theme and the power of death loom through his work, great, churning, masculine universes overflowing with Old Testament savagery and a primal mysticism indebted to the blood-drenched history of the American West. Sons and fathers are central to Cormac McCarthy’s novels.
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