THE ROADCormac McCarthy

1The Road – Cormac McCarthy – compiled by N Carey

2The Road – Cormac McCarthy – compiled by N Carey

Mark Mordue, reviewerOctober 6, 2006

We follow father and son as they head for the coast on foot, pushing a cart, scavenging through empty houses and gutted cities, eluding gangs reduced to cannibalism and sub-human madness. Everywhere is burnt and grey, marked with ash.

"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."

Neither the man nor the boy is given a name. But their fretful tenderness and constant fear gives animal urgency to their long march. It is soon established what the father must do if they are in danger of being captured. "He watched the boy sleeping. Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?"

McCarthy maintains the pace by keeping each scene barely more than a paragraph long. 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.

Every time father or son moves more than a few feet away from the other, a panic intrudes as you read. 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. Few will read The Road without running to their own children and holding them close.

McCarthy, now 73, has a seven-year-old son of his own. It's possible to read this book as a love letter to his child, a dark adieu. I'm not sure of the conclusion, its sudden irradiating burst into faith and colour, which comes too quickly and briefly to satisfy. But perhaps that's a truth of its own: "He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he."

The Road (2006)

3The Road – Cormac McCarthy – compiled by N Carey

Cormac McCarthy’s tenth novel, The Road , is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods.

Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. The boy and his father hope to avoid the marauders, reach a milder climate, and perhaps locate some remnants of civilization still worthy of that name. They possess only what they can scavenge to eat, and the rags they wear and the heat of their own bodies are all the shelter they have. A pistol with only a few bullets is their only defense besides flight. Before them the father pushes a shopping cart filled with blankets, cans of food and a few other assets, like jars of lamp oil or gasoline siphoned from the tanks of abandoned vehicles—the cart is equipped with a bicycle mirror so that they will not be surprised from behind.

Through encounters with other survivors brutal, desperate or pathetic, the father and son are both hardened and sustained by their will, their hard-won survivalist savvy, and most of all by their love for each other. They struggle over mountains, navigate perilous roads and forests reduced to ash and cinders, endure killing cold and freezing rainfall. Passing through charred ghost towns and ransacking abandoned markets for meager provisions, the pair battle to remain hopeful. They seek the most rudimentary sort of salvation. However, in The Road, such redemption as might be permitted by their circumstances depends on the boy’s ability to sustain his own instincts for compassion and empathy in opposition to his father’s insistence upon their mutual self-interest and survival at all physical and moral costs.

Set in the smoking ashes of a post-apocalyptic America, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road tells the story of a father-son journey toward the sea and an uncertain salvation. The world they pass through is a ghastly vision of scorched countryside and blasted cities “held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell” [p. 181]. It is a starved world, all plant and animal life dead or dying, some human survivors even eating each other alive.

The father and son move through the ruins searching for food and shelter, trying to keep safe from murderous, roving bands. They have only a pistol to defend themselves, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

Awesome in the totality of its vision, The Road is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

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The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing but The Truth: Honesty and Deception in a Complex WorldBy Chris Wood, Vice President, Santa Fe Institute

Can we justify being less than fully truthful to a spouse, child or aging parent to avoid causing them pain? Even this seemingly simple question demonstrates that intentions and motives add immense complexity and depth to the roles honesty and deception play in human interactions. Attempting to understand phenomena such as honesty and deception in their broadest social, biological and physical science contexts is a central research strategy of Cormac McCarthy and his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute.

"You dont believe me.I believe you.Okay.I always believe you.I dont think so.Yes I do. I have to" (p. 156).

That interchange between father and son in The Road exemplifies the patchwork of truths, part-truths, "white lies" and deliberate deception that permeates our interactions with each other. The moral and ethical values many societies place on telling the truth may compete with other important motives. Differences among cultures in those roles complicate the picture even further. The oath our judicial system requires of witnesses—"to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"—acknowledges that truth and falsehood are not a simple binary distinction and emphasizes there are numerous ways, in addition to outright lies, we can cheat the truth.

The Road Through Hell, Paved With Desperation By JANET MASLIN

Published: September 25, 2006

In The Road a boy and his father lurch across the cold, wretched, wet, corpse-strewn, ashen landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. The imagery is brutal even by Cormac McCarthy’s high standards for despair. This parable is also trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare. The Road would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty.

This is an exquisitely bleak incantation — pure poetic brimstone. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see.

5The Road – Cormac McCarthy – compiled by N Carey

“There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who is not honored here today,” the father says, trying to make his son understand why they inhabit a gray moonscape. “Whatever form you spoke of you were right.” Thus The Road keeps pace with the most enterprising doomsayers as death and desperation manifest themselves on every page. And in a perverse miracle it yields one last calamity when it seems that things cannot possibly get worse.

Yet as the boy and man wander, encountering remnants of the lost world and providing the reader with more and more clues about what destroyed it, this narrative is also illuminated by extraordinary tenderness. “He knew only that the child was his warrant,” it says of the father and his mission. “He said: if he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

The father’s loving efforts to shepherd his son are made that much more wrenching by the unavailability of food, shelter, safety, companionship or hope in most places where they scavenge to subsist.

Keeping memory alive is difficult, since the past grows increasingly remote. It is as if these lonely characters are experiencing “the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” The past has become like a place inhabited by the newly blind, all of it slowly slipping away. As for looking toward the future, “there is no later,” the book says starkly. “This is later.”

The ruined setting of The Road is strewn with terrible, revealing artifacts. There are old newspapers. (“The curious news. The quaint concerns.”) There is one lone bottle of Coca-Cola, still absurdly fizzy when all else is dust. There are charred corpses frozen in their final postures, like the long-dead man who sits on a porch like “a straw man set out to announce some holiday.” Sometimes these prompt the father to recall “a dull rose glow in the windowglass” at 1:17 in the morning, the moment when the clocks stopped forever.

The Road is not concerned with explaining what caused this cataclysm. It is more abstract than that. Instead it becomes a relentless cautionary tale with Lord of the Flies-style symbolic impact, marked by a dark fascination with the primal laws of survival. Much of its impact comes from the absolute lawlessness of its backdrop as it undermines the father’s only remaining certitude: that he must keep his boy alive no matter what danger befalls them.

As they move down the metaphorical road of the title, father and son encounter all manner of perils. The weather is bitter, the landscape colorless, the threat of starvation imminent. There is also the occasional interloper or ominous relic, since the road is not entirely abandoned.

The sight of a scorched, shuffling man prompts the boy to ask what is wrong with him; the father simply replies that the man has been struck by lightning. Spear-carrying marchers on

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the road offer other hints about recent history. Groups of people are stowed away in hidden places as if they were other people’s food supply. In a book filled with virtual zombies and fixated on the living dead, it turns out that they are.

Since the cataclysm has presumably incinerated all dictionaries, McCarthy’s affinity for words like rachitic and crozzled has as much visceral, atmospheric power as precise meaning. His use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are hellish, a hint that The Road will ultimately be more radiant than it is punishing. Somehow McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it. This is art that both frightens and inspires.

Although The Road is entirely unsentimental, it gives father and son a memory to keep them moving, even if it is the memory of how and why the boy’s mother chose to die. She was pregnant when the world exploded, and the boy was born a few days after she and the man “watched distant cities burn.”

Ultimately she gave up and took a bullet: “She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.” In a book whose events are isolated and carefully chosen, the appearance of a flare gun late in the story is filled with echoes of her final decision.

The mother’s suicide is one more reason for astonishment at McCarthy’s final gesture here: an embrace of faith in the face of no hope whatsoever. Coming as it does after such intense moments of despondency, this faith is even more of a leap than it might be in a more forgiving story. It adds immeasurably to the staying power of a book that is simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear.

The Road offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever.

By Alan Cheuse

September 24, 2006

As a reader of everything good I can get my hands on, from James Joyce to Isaac Asimov, I’m always thrilled

when a fine writer of first-class fiction takes up the genre of science fiction and matches its possibilities with his

7The Road – Cormac McCarthy – compiled by N Carey

or her own powers. In our own time Doris Lessing has done it with powerful results. So has Margaret Atwood.

Now Cormac McCarthy, one of our country’s most lauded writers, has done it and made a dark book that glows

with the intensity of his huge gift for language.

The Road is a post atomic apocalypse novel as we’ve never seen one before, a black book of wondrous

paragraphs that reads as though Samuel Beckett had dared himself to outdo Harlan Ellison. It gives us the story

of a father and son traveling from north to south on the East Coast of a U.S. in the wake of a blasting that

changes the world forever:

“The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.”

The old life is gone.

And after giving birth to the boy, the man’s wife goes, too, a desperate suicide. Since then, man and boy have

been on the road, eating what they can salvage in a region ravaged by pitiless cannibals, their travels

circumscribed by gray, sunless days and nights that are “sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your

ears with listening… . No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees.”

On one of the countless nights of their journey, the father rises and stands “tottering in that cold autistic dark with

his arms out held for balance while the vestibular calculations in his 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.”

As readers we do something similar, reading our way into a scenario in which light is spare, danger ever-present

and the only hope the possibility of the remnants–food and clothing and shelter–of a civilization that will never

return. “On this road,” the father tells himself, “there are no god spoke men. They are gone and I am left and

they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?”

Against this bleakness, McCarthy shores old ruins, characterizing such actions as the father making a safe place

for his son to sleep at night and drying the boy’s hair before a fire as “like some ancient anointing”:

“So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon

them.”

The father constructs and breathes, using his survival skills to keep the two on the road and moving south. The

boy has only his small youthful hope to carry against the dark, and about this he requires frequent reassurance:

“We’re going to be okay, aren’t we Papa?

“Yes. We are.

“And nothing bad is going to happen to us.

“That’s right.

“Because we’re carrying the fire.

“Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.”

In that Beckettian spirit, McCarthy seems to be carrying his own small light, though keeping it under a bushel as

he narrates incident after incident of danger and despair, interspersed only now and then by the discovery of a

food cache or, after the father carves for his son a rudimentary flute from a piece of roadside cane, when the boy

plays a “formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes

of its ruin.”

By now the question must have arisen for you: Why read this? Why subsume your own optimism in the obsidian

bleakness of this great stylist’s vision of nearly utter despair? Heaps of ashes everywhere, plenty of ruin. Aside

from the fact that Cormac McCarthy could write instructions on a microwave that sounded like a version of the

King James Bible, why keep pushing ahead?

Because in its lapidary transcription of the deepest despair short of total annihilation we may ever know, this

book announces the triumph of language over nothingness. Or, as the heroic father and son would put it, it

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carries the fire.

———-

Alan Cheuse is a book commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” a writing teacher at George Mason

University and the author, most recently, of the short-story collection “Lost and Old Rivers.”

Cormac McCarthy discovered his voice decades ago, but maybe only now, with his devastating 10th novel, has he found the

landscape perfectly matched to his cosmically bleak vision. Even the corpse-littered Texas-Mexico border wasn't quite flinty enough for McCarthy, who has never seemed more at home, more eloquent, than in the sere, post-apocalyptic ash land of The Road.

The novel begins quietly, softly, in the woods at night. An unnamed man awakens from a troubling dream and reaches to touch his young son, to feel the rise and fall of ''each precious breath.'' The two are on the move, heading south, pushing a grocery cart

through a ''cauterized terrain'' of charred trees and lifeless rivers. And in contrast to the instantly palpable tenderness between father and son, the surrounding horrors only gradually appear in chilling, offhand glimpses. Houses and supermarkets have been

ransacked and abandoned; shriveled bodies lie, unburied, in bedrooms and old trailers; packs of men in gas masks wielding pipes roam the countryside, cannibalizing and raping. McCarthy never specifies what happened, beyond a single, sketchy flashback that

suggests a nuclear disaster: Years ago, days before the boy's birth, the clocks stopped with ''a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.''

''The frailty of everything revealed at last,'' the man thinks. And with that frailty, so its forever-lost beauty, which torments him daily: the pinholes in a mantel that once held Christmas stockings; the ''quaint concerns'' in a salvaged newspaper; the memory of the

theater where he once heard music with his wife. By night, he dreams of the old earth; by day, he and the boy struggle onward through the ash, repetitively asking and answering the same few primal questions: Are we still the good guys (the man in fact may

no longer be)? What, if anything, do we owe our fellow creatures? Are we going to die? Would we be better off dead? To this last one, the boy's mother answered with suicide, announcing to the man, ''I am done with my own whorish heart.'' Her long and windy

speech, which seems torn from another reality, is perhaps the only discordant note in an otherwise flawless novel. McCarthy has never done women well. Then again, neither did Michelangelo.

Early in the novel, the man carves his son a flute from some cane. As they walk through the ''ashen scabland,'' he hears the boy playing ''a formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.'' The

extraordinarily lovely and sad final pages of this masterpiece embrace both terrible possibilities.

Men at WorkThe literary masculinity of Cormac McCarthy.By Jennifer Egan Posted Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2006, at 6:57 PM ET

One begins The Road, Cormac McCarthy's new masterpiece, awaiting the moment when the burned and ravaged deathscape that surrounds his unnamed male protagonist and the man's young son will exhaust itself; when they'll look around a bend or across a ridge and see color and life—a natural world they can engage with. That's how it

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works in "Big Two-Hearted River," Ernest Hemingway's famous post-World War I short story, to which The Road seems to allude directly. Hemingway's story is the apotheosis of a form of literary masculinity that features men in contention with the natural world, testing their expertise against it and finding, in their mastery of it, meaning—even grace. McCarthy is no stranger to this brand of masculinity, but here he invokes it as a self-conscious memory, a literary past that hovers in the reader's imagination, reminding us of forms of masculine pleasure and satisfaction that have been irrevocably lost in the post-apocalyptic horror he's conjured. With only the corpse of a natural world to grapple with, McCarthy's father and son exist in a realm rarely seen in the ur-masculine literary tradition: the domestic. And from this unlikely vantage McCarthy makes a big, shockingly successful grab at the universal.

In the fictional realm Hemingway defined and epitomized, since visited by writers like Norman Maclean, William Kittredge, and Rick Bass, the natural world acts as a means of sublimating and exorcising men's emotional states. In Hemingway's case, its hallmark was a subdued meting out of descriptive detail that suggested emotional restraint, even repression. In "Big Two-Hearted River," the perennial Hemingway protagonist Nick Adams returns, wounded from war, to the town of Seney, only to find it burned to the ground. "There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country," the story reads. "The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had left not a trace ..." In a nearby river, Nick sees trout—the same he imagined fishing for during the nights in Italy (related in another Hemingway story, "Now I Lay Me") when he was wounded. "Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again." The sight of trout lifts Nick out of his dark mood; nature is a haven from the injuries and disappointments human beings inflict upon each other. Hemingway often voices this pessimism, but it is nowhere to be found when his protagonists are in the natural world, even when Nick Adams confronts the destruction of the town he remembers. "Seney was burned, the country was burned over and changed, but it did not matter. It could not all be burned."

In The Road, everything is burned—the result of an apocalyptic event (whether of natural or human origin is never clear) that killed virtually all forms of life and that threatens, a decade later, to wipe out the human race. There is no limit to the devastation, only new forms of its expression, and McCarthy renders these up in lush, sensuous prose that belies the inertness of its object and keeps the reader in a constant state of longing and alarm. "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." But these gorgeous descriptions are a foil, a tease—nature as we know it exists only in the dreams and memories of the man and in the questions of his son, who was born days after the apocalypse and talks of crows, the sun—now permanently obscured—and the blue sea with the same mythical longing one hears in today's children's talk of queens and dragons. Early in the novel, the man looks at a river now empty of life and recalls seeing trout: "He'd stood at such a river once and watched the flash of trout deep in a pool, invisible to see in the tea-colored water except as they turned on their sides to feed. Reflecting back the sun deep in the darkness like a flash of knives in a cave."

10The Road – Cormac McCarthy – compiled by N Carey

The man, who goes unnamed, is an outdoorsman in the Hemingway tradition. His savvy and wits kept him alive through the apocalypse—he began filling a bathtub with water as soon as he heard the explosions—and have sustained him and his son through the following years of misrule by marauding gangs of thugs who steal, kill, and eat the only fresh food still available: human flesh. His keen instincts rescue the pair several times over the course of the book as they head south, toward the coast, hoping for warmer weather. He's good at building and repairing things, and McCarthy enumerates the mechanics of this work with a meditative absorption that evokes Hemingway. Here the man repairs the wheel of their cart: "… He pulled the bolt and bored out the collet with a hand drill and resleeved it with a section of pipe he'd cut to length with a hacksaw. Then he bolted it all back together and stood the cart upright and wheeled it around the floor. It ran fairly true." Our literary expectation is that the man's ingenuity will redeem him, but while it's true that he and the boy survive a number of scrapes in The Road, the agony of the novel is that things are getting worse, not better. At one time the man used to teach the boy lessons, but that has fallen away. Now he's coughing up blood and knows he will soon die of some affliction to his lungs—perhaps caused by the explosions and ceaseless fires that still burn. On a denatured planet, the man's survival skills are focused purely on scavenging for and protecting his son, whom he cares for with passionate devotion. The bulk of The Road consists of the rituals of child-care and child rearing, which McCarthy renders with a tenderness that is a world apart from that of Nick Adams, whose father delivered a child before his eyes and inveighed against masturbation, bestiality, and fear of the woods. In a bomb shelter the man finds underground, he tries to cut the boy's hair: "He tried to do a good job and it took some time. When he was done he took the towel from around the boy's shoulders and he scooped the golden hair from the floor and wiped the boy's face and shoulders with a damp cloth and held a mirror for him to see." Later, when the boy is sick, McCarthy writes of the man: "He held him all night, dozing off and waking in terror, feeling for the boy's heart. In the morning he was no better. He tried to get him to drink some juice but he would not. He pressed his hand to his forehead, conjuring up a coolness that would not come. He wiped his white mouth while he slept. I will do what I promised, he whispered. No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone." It's worth asking whether this passage would seem mawkish if the parent in question were a woman—whether the literary trappings of self-conscious maleness are what allow McCarthy to maintain such agonizing pathos while inoculating him against sentimentality and, by association, triviality. His single failure in The Road, interestingly, comes in his treatment of the boy's mother, who appears in an early flashback to inform her husband that she's chosen to kill herself rather than face the end of the world. The lifeless rhetoric McCarthy ascribes to her as she justifies abandoning her child makes for a two-dimensional contrast to the lively characterizations of father and son. Beyond the immediate struggle for survival, the deep struggle explored in The Road is that of raising a child in a world without hope; and for the boy, the complementary challenge of assuming the responsibilities of manhood in such a world. There would seem to be nothing to sustain these two—the natural world exists only in effigy, and the remaining humans have mostly sacrificed their humanity as the price of survival. Yet the boy is constantly seeking to define a moral structure he can live by—one that accounts for the fact that his father doesn't help stray people on the road, but still ensures their own distinction from the cannibals. After they discover a basement full of human prisoners who will be used for food, the boy asks: "We wouldn't ever eat anybody, would we?"No. Of course not.Even if we were starving?

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We're starving now.You said we weren't.I said we weren't dying. I didn't say we weren't starving.But we wouldn't.No. We wouldn't.No matter what.No. No matter what.Because we're the good guys.Yes.And we're carrying the fire.And we're carrying the fire. Yes.Okay.The existence of a moral structure—the will to do good—is the soaring discovery hidden in McCarthy's scourged planet. He evokes Hemingway's literary vision in order to invert it, first by eliminating the promise that nature can provide a refuge from human destruction (an appropriate revision in our era of nuclear rogues and global warming) and finally by giving us redemption in the form of the love between a parent and a child—their desire to be good although it serves no purpose. McCarthy is overt in his suggestion that this vision is holy. As the dying man is cared for by his son, he describes the boy as being surrounded by light. Watching him, the man seems to address some higher power directly with his mind: "Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right." In the novel's final passage, eerily reminiscent of "Big Two-Hearted River," McCarthy returns to the image of trout: "Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow … On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back." Hemingway's emotional and spiritual refuge is long gone. But the redemption, McCarthy seems to say, was in us all the time.

This is the End

“The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discarded to a man like

pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long stolen.” -- The Road

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The apocalypse is not to be tinkered with lightly, or given to writers of lesser caliber—unfortunately this is not a widely held belief. As an event, it has long the province of the lower order of genre writers, who are more often interested in the end of the world as a nifty device for getting rid of law and order, thusly allowing their heroes to battle across harsh and forbidding landscapes with jerry-rigged, Mad Max-style weaponry.

This is not to say that the apocalypse should be left for writers of literature, of “real” fiction. The simple truth of the matter is that they are too often bereft of the right kind of imagination to make such a landscape come alive. Although there exist many excellent and thoughtful novels of the post-apocalypse from science fiction writers—Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz are two astounding examples that come right to mind—their authors can tend to get overly hung up on the particulars of their created world (this over-emphasis on the exterior as opposed to interior is of course a job hazard for sci-fi-ers). All too rarely comes along a writer who can marry the interior and exterior in a manner befitting the subject.

This is all a long way of getting around to the fact that the recently quite-productive Cormac McCarthy has written a new novel, The Road, which is set in a post-apocalyptic environment, and it’s as though he was made for it. The book is not only an instant classic of its type, it’s pretty close to being the novel of the year.

Given his penchant for characters wandering or fighting their way through harsh environments, it’s in some sense no surprise that McCarthy would be drawn to the apocalypse. Novels like Outer Dark and Blood Meridian are heavily populated with iconic stragglers of this sort, creeping in a crepuscular fashion towards uncertain fates, with deathly fate everywhere. In The Road, McCarthy takes a style that’s always had a tilt towards the gothic and gives it free reign as he follows a father and son diligently struggling across a blasted and dead countryside that seems to have once been America, barely surviving from one day to the next while carrying some vague idea of reaching the sea. What should happen once they reach the sea is never quite said.

We know that the civilization-ending event happened a few years prior, since the young son can’t remember anything but their current nightmare existence as he was still in his mother’s belly when it happened. What is worse is that the father, like most of the shattered husks of humanity still trudging through the ashy ruins, has the curse of memory. The apocalypse itself is taken care of quite succinctly: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of concussions.” Why or how it happened is never discussed, the father only flashes back occasionally on memories of his wife, before returning to the interminable Sisyphusean struggle of his everyday reality, an unrelenting scrabbling for food in a world long picked-over for its last scraps.

What seems to have been a nuclear winter has settled over the world, leaving little in its wake. There are references to the immediate aftermath, when “the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded ... creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland ... The frailty of everything revealed at last.” By the time The Road is set, however, even those years are a distant memory, the only people the father and son come across are best avoided, desperate creatures with little left to eat but each other.

In an unexpected twist, instead of having the son act as a symbol of a new animalistic humanity, having never known any semblance of civilization, McCarthy makes him the conscience of the two. Finding people chained up in a cellar and screaming for help, the son instantly wants to set them free, while the father forces him to run, knowing that their captors will soon return. If McCarthy had simply set the father at loose in this wilderness, without the son to keep on him like some half-forgotten conscience of a dead world he never knew, the book would have been not only unrelenting (which it is) but also unrewarding.

There are times when The Road is practically too much to bear, with its demonic vistas and cities with “cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.” The combination of a hope-deprived world crumbling into nothingness and McCarthy’s astringent, horrifying prose imagining all too believably the depths to which a shattered humanity can sink, makes for an emotionally devastating experience, and one not quickly shed.

But as with all great literature of the apocalypse, The Road is not just a litany of despair, it is a lament for all that was lost, and thusly, a celebration of the here and now. His novel may have the trappings of

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a horror film, but with his stubborn wanderers diligently batting their unanswerable questions back and forth in a godless waste, McCarthy enters the land of Beckett.

— 18 September 2006In Robert Frost's famous poem "Fire and Ice" he writes, "Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice."

Human desire will cause the world to end in fire, he suggests, but then adds with a wicked grin that if it had to "perish

twice," icy hate would do the job just as well.

In Cormac McCarthy's stunning and heart-wrenching new novel, The Road, the world ends by both fire and by ice.

Unlike Frost's pessimistic, yet observant, post-World War I warning, the cataclysm that snuffs out all life on Earth

except a handful of humans (most of whom would rather be dead), is apolitical and essentially a mystery. This, believe

it or not, is a good thing. McCarthy's aim, it would seem, is not to play the post-apocalyptic blame game but rather to

offer his own warning that "there is no later. This is later" and that ultimately the past, like so much else, will become

only "the frailty of everything revealed at last." In other words, in the end, we have only what we can hold onto right

now, in this place and at this moment. In The Road it is a father and son who only have each other.

The cataclysm is mostly unnamed and barely remarked upon (from the scant clues, one might deduce a meteor or

some atmospheric disturbance), but the ruined landscape is brutally and relentlessly described. The earth is scorched

and its surface ashen. The weather is nothing but a growing veneer of snow and icy rain. Trees and other vegetation

are dead and either crumble to dust at a passing touch or make an eerie backdrop to a gray and darkened scenery. All

animal life, with the exception of a few desperate and battered humans, is extinct. The food stores of the world have

been long ago consumed, leaving only the options of skilled scavenging for the meager remains of canned goods or

cannibalism, and for many of the few left, the option taken is the latter.

This is a world where the discovery of a solitary can of Coke is like the gifts of a thousand Christmases. It is a world

where the idea of any past normalcy flies in the face of the present reality. Forget about cellular phones, forget about

the Internet and certainly forget about your plans for the weekend, because in this world none of that matters, and such

things from the past inevitably fall into a void. Here reminiscences are a dangerous distraction, and the notion of there

ever being states in this country is almost a quaint concept. It is a world where "all things of grace and beauty such

that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain." All there is to this world is a few survivors and

the road on which they travel.

At the center of this road are a father and his very young son, so young as to have been born after the cataclysm. They

are both unnamed and therefore represent all of the survivors, or at least "the good guys," for this novel is also filled

with "bad guys." When they first have one of their rare encounters with another human, it has been more than a year

since they have spoken to anyone else. Most of the humans they encounter are leathery, desiccated corpses, and for the

most part they fear and avoid others who are living. The mother of the child, blinded and broken by the road,

committed suicide, taking a "new lover" in death. She wants to take the child with her, too, and, sadly, she makes a

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convincing argument. But the man understands "that the boy was all that stood between him and death," and in these

desperate circumstances even the simple thought of death threatens to bring it forth.

So this father and son, conversing like a bedraggled Vladimir and Estragon, toddle across this bleak frontier in search

of the coast and the dim hope of survival. Their path is like a reverse transcontinental migration, moving from the

West to the East. The land is unnamed because this is a time where names have become vacant, but hints like a "See

Rock City" sign and old Doric columns place them in the Southeast. Deprivation is a constant as they barely beat out

starvation several times through a combination of luck, ingenuity and desperation. As McCarthy puts it, "they set out

upon the road again, slumped and cowled and shivering in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their

keep."

Most of their journey is a grueling process of survival as they rifle through the ravaged remains of abandoned and

half-ruined buildings, searching for anything to eat or something that will aid in their journey. But they also have

several harrowing encounters, the most terrifying of which involves a basement full of human livestock, and the most

disturbing concerning a cannibalized infant. Then there are tender moments, like when the boy, who seems to be the

last flame of sanguinity in the world, wants to save others who cannot be saved, including a Fisher King latter-day

Elijah literally lost in the wilderness who claims "there is no God and we are his prophets." The father is a pragmatist,

a man skilled enough to be anyone's desired doomsday companion. He has less room in his heart for compassion, but

his love for the boy sustains him and keeps his humanity buoyant.

Around each corner it looks as if all is lost, and then there is a reprieve, but ultimately we can sense where this is

headed, and to think otherwise would be foolish -- or would it? McCarthy had the tough challenge of how to end this

story. The world is dead, so where do we go from here? To his credit he takes us to where we know we are headed,

but also leaves us with a spring's sprig of promise and redemption. The world might be dead, but life, somehow,

manages to persist in an uncertain spirit of faith. God is rescued and denied in this novel, for God's apparent absence is

noted, but this is also a spiritual work, in the sense that spirit and faith are constant partners. Yet, unlike the Left

Behind series, to which some might make comparisons, this is not about religious doctrine. Rather it is about the kind

of spiritual faith people need to survive, that they need to sustain them in these troubled times, and that has nothing to

do with doctrine. It is about what it is to be human and a child of God. We suffer like Job, but we are redeemed only

by each other.

The Road is a remarkable and unforgettable novel. It has its dystrophic antecedents, such as the Mad Max films or

Stephen King's entertaining yet bloated novel "The Stand," or from a more literary perspective Paul Auster's novel In

the Country of Last Things and Nevil Shute's On the Beach, yet The Road stands on its own. It accomplishes this

mostly through poetics, for McCarthy is one of the most richly stylized writers in American letters, which allows him

to craft this narrative with the startling vividness and complexity of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. McCarthy is able to

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do this and at the same time create a work that is beautifully restrained. The effort is even more remarkable

considering that McCarthy's previous effort, No Country for Old Men, was such a disappointing and feckless mess.

No Country for Old Men was perceived by some as a bottom of a long decline, starting with All the Pretty Horses and

working its way through the rest of the Border Trilogy. All of these works had their moments, and in some instances

they were brilliant moments, but none of them shone as complete, holistic works. The Road, on the other hand, is not

only McCarthy's best writing in more than 20 years, but also stands almost equal to his masterpieces Suttree and Blood

Meridian. It is a book with a gorgeous and startling heart.

The Road Discussion Questions

1. Cormac McCarthy has an unmistakable prose style. What do you see as the most distinctive features of that style? How is the writing in The Road in some ways more like poetry than narrative prose? 

2. Why do you think McCarthy has chosen not to give his characters names? How do the generic labels of "the man" and "the boy" affect the way in which readers relate to them? 

16The Road – Cormac McCarthy – compiled by N Carey

3. How is McCarthy able to make the post-apocalyptic world of The Road seem so real and utterly terrifying? Which descriptive passages are especially vivid and visceral in their depiction of this blasted landscape? What do you find to be the most horrifying features of this world and the survivors who inhabit it? 

4. McCarthy doesn't make explicit what kind of catastrophe has ruined the earth and destroyed human civilization, but what might be suggested by the many descriptions of a scorched landscape covered in ash? What is implied by the father's statement that, "On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world," [p. 32]? 

5. As the father is dying, he tells his son he must go on in order to "carry the fire." When the boy asks if the fire is real, the father says, "It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it" [p. 279]. What is this fire? Why is it so crucial that they not let it die? 

6. McCarthy envisions a post-apocalyptic world in which "murder was everywhere upon the land" and the earth would soon be "largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes" [p. 181]. How difficult or easy is it to imagine McCarthy's nightmare vision actually happening? Do you think people would likely behave as they do in the novel, under the same circumstances? Does it now seem that human civilization is headed toward such an end? 

7. The man and the boy think of themselves as the "good guys." In what ways are they like and unlike the "bad guys" they encounter? What do you think McCarthy is suggesting in the scenes in which the boy begs his father to be merciful to the strangers they encounter on the road? How is the boy able to retain his compassion—to be, as one reviewer put it, "compassion incarnate"? 

8. The sardonic blind man named Ely who the man and boy encounter on the road tells the father that, "There is no God and we are his prophets" [p. 170]. What does he mean by this? Why does the father say about his son, later in the same conversation, "What if I said that he's a god?" [p. 172] Are we meant to see the son as a savior? 

9. The Road takes the form of a classic journey story—a form that dates back to Homer's The Odyssey. To what destination are the man and the boy journeying? In what sense are they "pilgrims"? What, if any, is the symbolic significance of their journey? 

10. McCarthy's work often dramatizes the opposition between good and evil, with evil sometimes emerging triumphantly. What does The Road ultimately suggest about good and evil? Which force seems to have greater power in the novel? 

11. What makes the relationship between the boy and his father so powerful and poignant? What do they feel for each other? How do they maintain their affection for and faith in each other in such brutal conditions?

12. Why do you think McCarthy ends the novel with the image of trout in mountain streams before the end of the world—"In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery" [p. 287]. What is surprising about this ending? Does it provide closure, or does it prompt a rethinking of all that has come before? What does it suggest about what lies ahead?

Big Two-Hearted River: Part I by Earnest Hemingway

SummaryThe narrator tells the story of Nick Adams's return to his old fishing terrain after the war.The train disappeared into the distance, through the burnt woods. Nick sat. The town of Seney was gone, burned down. He looked into the river. The trout were still there. He watched them. They still gave him the old feeling. Nick picked up his pack and started walking through the country. He was sore and hot, but happy. He felt he had left the need for everything, including writing and thinking, behind him. He came up to the pine tree plain. Far away, he could see the blue hills next to Lake Superior. He stopped for a moment

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to sit and smoke with his legs stretched in front of him. A black grasshopper attached to his sock. He realized that the grasshoppers had not always been black but had changed because the forest was all burnt out. Nick guided himself by the sun. He could have turned toward the river, but decided to keep going as far as possible that day. There was no underbrush near the pine trees. Under the shade of those trees, he took off his pack and went to sleep.He woke up as the sun was going down. He was sore. He started out toward the river, which he thought couldn't be more than a mile. He finally approached the river on the edge of a meadow. He went down to the river to watch the trout rising to feed on the insects that were resting on the surface of the water. Nick set up camp. He spread out blankets for his bed and erected a tent, carefully and methodically. He was pleased with the home that he made for the night. He went outside to make dinner for himself. He dumped a can of pork and beans and one of spaghetti into a pan. He announced to no one in particular that he has a right to eat those things if he is willing to carry them. He made a fire and warmed the food. He let it cool before eating it, though. When he finished, he went down to the river to get water for coffee. He made coffee like Hopkins made it. He ate a can of apricots. He began to think about Hopkins, a serious man who was wealthy. Hopkins "went away when the telegram came." He gave Nick his gun and Bill his camera. They were all supposed to go fishing again the next summer. They never saw him again. Nick returned to the present. The coffee was bitter. He got into bed. He was comfortable, except for a mosquito buzzing in his ear. He killed the mosquito and went to sleep.CommentaryNick's return home is infused with the issues faced by a man coming back from war. Everything at home is burnt out and abandoned. This state of Nick's homeland represents the feeling of many veterans returning home. Whether or not their homes are actually demolished, they are symbolically demolished. After seeing war, home can never seem as innocent and carefree. Further, no one else can understand what a soldier has gone through, so he might as well be alone. Finally, a burnt-out town looks similar to one that has been bombed out or blown apart. Therefore, it is as if Nick's home has also been destroyed by the war. Nick also confronts the new freedom of a man returning from the army. Now, he can choose whether or not to carry heavy food: He has that freedom. Further, he can make his own bed that no one can disturb. Even during his long day of hiking, he feels happy because he can decide for himself where to go and how fast.Nick's return home is also full of experiences that he had along his developmental journey. He learned from Bugs how to cook in a pan with bread to sop up the left-over sauce. As he sits against the tree with his legs sprawled out, the reader is reminded of his being shot and propped up against a church. Nick remembers an argument with Hopkins, presumably just one of the friends he has lost.The grasshoppers are an important symbol. They have become black to adapt to their new, blackened surroundings. Nick wonders how long they will stay like that. These grasshoppers represent Nick and other soldiers who become hardened by the war experience because they are in a tough environment. No one knows how long they will remain hardened either.

18The Road – Cormac McCarthy – compiled by N Carey