The Road to Where?

Cormac McCarthy, The Road. The Road is the story of a man and his son trying to live after a nuclear war. The Mother has committed suicide, unable to steel herself for the struggle for life that must follow. What does one do in such a situation? One collects what one can carry, food, and a gun if possible, and moves south, out of the blizzards of the north to the less punishing climate of the coast. But this is a nuclear winter, and seasons are not as we would recognise them. Life is a grimy, pitiful struggle to keep warm and to find tinned food, left over from before the war and not yet eaten by other survivors. Of there are very few, and McCarthy’s book includes only four meetings between people other than the Man, as he is called, and his son. Other survivors are not to be trusted; they have been driven wild by the demands of the hunter gatherer life forced upon them, raping and cannibalising all who cannot resist. Despite the horrendous conditions, the two reach the beach, only for the father to be killed by an arrow from a stranger’s bow.

This book has received the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Does it deserve it? It is an easy read, despite its occasional dips into sordid after-holocaust glimpses of cannibalism, slavery and violence. And they are sordid. The reader is treated to naked victims of highway kidnapping holed up in an underground sty, waiting to be eaten. Then there is the marauding regiment of hooded thugs, their slaves, concubines, and catamites in tow. These follow the stranger whose first instinct is to drag the boy off to his gang, only to be killed by the father’s gun. Then comes the old man, benign enough but nearly blind and starving, whose only real contribution to the plot is to comment on the unchanging abjectness of human life, whether before or after the bomb. But they are not the point.

For unexplained reasons, our man and boy are ‘the good guys.’ Rather than selling his son into prostitution or eating him himself, the father has retained his antique family values. He lives now only to protect the day to day existence of the son, with only the aid of his wits and three rounds of ammunition in his pistol. This is a portrait of human decency. Even faced with a world where he sees corpses left to rot unburied, and where that group of men on the horizon are very probably going to kill you and eat you, the paternal instinct is not forgotten, at least not by this man. However, everyone else has turned feral.

I don’t know whether the book deserves such a prestigious award as the Pulitzer, but it definitely has its flaws. Why is this man so unusual in his continuing morality? The only clue we are given about his pre-war life is from the moments before disaster; seeing the distant flashes, his first thought is to run a bath. Clean water will be in short supply very soon. So he is resourceful. The next incident we are told about is his arguments with his wife about her decision to kill herself. He is against it. She kills herself anyway. The only justification for his fatherly attitude that we are left with is that he is a ‘good guy.’ Perhaps this is justification in itself, it certainly raises more questions than it solves. But this open question demands much from the relationship between this father and his son. The lack of any other developed personality in the book means compelling and believable dialog is essential. Without it we’re left with an unsatisfying, accidental plot. The motivation of this man can only be guessed at; is it fatherly love? Is it predestination (is he perhaps in a Calvinist state of grace?), stupidity? Maybe it’s Darwinian self-interest? Unfortunately the father and son do not really have conversations, and neither demonstrates much feeling towards the other, saving the son’s habit of following his dad around, aware of the fact that he can’t defend himself. So again we are left without a reason to believe in these characters.

The real interest in this book is contained in its first seventy pages, in which MacCarthy demonstrates spare and unbelievably vivid prose. One could pick almost any passage in these pages and find sentences that are shocking, blood-curdling descriptions of devastated modernity, my favourite being a picture of the survivors; ‘Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.’ These two sentences sum up the story; after the collapse of society, most men are left empty of everything but their base instincts, the various kinds of hunger.

It’s not that I disliked this book, I enjoyed it. It is wonderfully morbid, and I read it in two sittings. The first third of the book contains writing that is among the most direct and threatening I’ve ever read. It is beautiful. But it reaches a point, in my opinion very soon after the humans-in-the-larder-cellar incident, at which you wonder whether you are reading a horror/thriller pulp fiction. This is a risk for a book this readable, because, snob that I am, I don’t want to read pulp fiction. I want to read the work of an artist, someone who can write a book that you recognise as theirs as soon as you open a page, just by their use of language. Someone who doesn’t patronise, and, very important in a book about the consequences of nuclear holocaust, doesn’t make a fetish of the horror that they describe. Mr McCarthy doesn’t do it, but he comes close. By the end, the book has lost its identity somewhat, becoming repetitive in its descriptions of foraging and sterile father-son patter. I won’t mention the very end, since I don’t want to completely spoil it. Suffice it to say, it’s very frustrating.