Cormac McCarthy's The Road
A Review of the American Authors 2007 Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel
In this shattering novel a father and son tread the scorched wastelands of a post-apocalyptic America in search of the coast, the sky above them clogged with a grey ash that blankets the arid plains and shrouds the burnt forests and shattered towns and cities they pass along the way. These skeletal settings are necessarily bereft of what, in the distant past, would have given them their individuality; they are nameless places unified by misery and despair, but amid the devastation the purest and strongest of human emotions are found in the paternal bond shared by father and son – hope, fear and undying love.
Shapes in the Wind
Aside from the ambiguity of a global apocalypse that may or may not have been caused by global warming what’s interesting about McCarthy’s novel is its apparent disengagement from the world as we know it; a perverse contextual curiosity could have been derived from visiting familiar landmarks under such circumstances but McCarthy avoids such temptations, and rightly so; in The Road buildings are merely shapes in the wind, the landscapes homogenous sweeps of abstracted nothingness, coloured from a dull palette of grey and white that moves one to consider the blurred pastoral imagery of Gerhard Richter’s Buhler Heights series. This is a world rooted very much in the present, for the present is all these characters have.
McCarthy’s appetite for pared back minimalism extends far beyond the realms of visual exposition. Here, the characters are as nameless as their surroundings, known only as Man and Boy. On the one occasion when the child does call his father by name McCarthy refuses to share it with his audience, opting instead to distance us from what is essentially a tender moment, one of many that offers a glimmer of hope for these scattered remnants of humanity.
Indeed, if McCarthy’s Earth is an arid ball circled by a cold sun, if its defeated towns and cities are empty shells, if the moral compass that guided their cannibalistic occupants has been crushed underfoot, then triumph is found in the subtlest of human gestures.
Film Adaptation
Given the subdued tempo of The Road , director John Hillcoat’s film adaptation (starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron) will make interesting viewing when released early next year (’09). One hopes that Hillcoat doesn’t sculpt it into a gratuitous post-apocalyptic parody a la Mad Max 2 or worse; this is after all a book of great beauty, a book of hope and, above all, a book that exposes the very nerve of love in the darkest of places. Let’s just hope it isn’t a warning.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Great Britain: Picador) 2007, ISBN 978-0-330-44754-6
Front cover image of 'The Road'
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