Cormac McCarthy - The Road

A boy & his father. They are travelling the road down south. There are few people left on earth. There is no sun. Everything is covered in ash. The father and the boy look for food in deserted houses. Death and decay is all around them. Everything is dying; people, nature. Gangs of robbers hover in the back of their minds. The father carries a pistol. He tries to tell the boy everything will be okay and that there is a point in continuing. They have no choice. To walk or to die.

This is the plot of Cormac McCarthy's book The Road, one of the bleakest books I've read to this date. How does McCarthy doing in describing a world that consists of nothing but ash, dead trees, slush and empty houses? Very well. In tiny sections of text, with language descriptive rather than emotive, McCarthy conjures up scenes few of us who've read the book will ever forget.

An evening of dull sulphur light from the fires. The standing water in the roadside ditches black with the runoff. The mountains shrouded away. They crossed the river by a concrete bridge where skeins of ash and slurry moved slowly in the current. Charred bits of wood. In the end they stopped and turned back and camped under the bridge.

A lot of stuff is merely hinted at. The father tried to convince his wife that life would be okay despite the miserable circumstances. Something bad happened. He set out on a journey with the boy. They have been travelling for a while. We know next to nothing about the life that the father led before the - whatever it was - happened. The boy has lived in an ashen, dead world all his life. The only person he has talked to, leaving aside a few people on the road, is his father. McCarthy describes their gentle intimacy, the physical dependency, but also fear and hopelessness. The boy asks his father whether they will die. His father answers him back that they won't. This is repeated over and over again. What is supposed to happen when they have reached the sea? We are not too sure. We just know that nothing did happen. And they don't seem surprised.

A cruel novel. Still, McCarthy's depiction of cruelty and the protagonists' reactions is believable; he is not a cynic but not sentimental either. Best of all, The Road is not one of those novels that carry out a thought experiment: "what would humans do, given...." In a good way, this is just a story. He is not trying to describe "human essence" in "bare life". He's telling a story & it feels real most of the time. A film will soon be released that is based on this novel. Viggo Mortensen plays the father. John Hillcoat, director, is responsible for stuff like Ghosts.....of the civil dead. And The Proposition. This looks promising indeed.