The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cormac McCarthyEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2006-09-26
ISBN: 0307265439
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of The Road
Book Review: Long Passage to Redemption
Summary: 5 Stars
A diaspora of father and son. A journey away from the remains of their hometown towards the coast and the south--but also a forced emigration from an old society obliterated by a cataclysmic event. The two protagonists, father and son, trek through wild terrain relying on the father's resourcefulness to overcome the myriad challenges they find along the way. They struggle to keep "the fire" alight as human beings, to persevere, escape the destroyed world and find some better place--to forge new meaning out of the bleak grayness of a foreboden time.
As with McCarthy's other works the language is poetic and evocative in a real and workman-like way. We are grounded to the earth and the landscape such that the reality of stuff is put directly before us. Single words and simple sentences--The hard rock. Bent tin. Water trickling down the pipe.--present the world without use of disingenuous rhetoric or flowery prose.
The book deals with the unnamed father's uncertainty as to whether the world is worthy to bequeath to his son. Whether there is any meaning left in this denuded and apocalyptic world. Whether he should save the boy from the burden of such a painful life and take both their own lives.
The father is the sole source of life the child has ever known. At one point the son tells his father that he has no choice but to believe his father's encouragements, because he has no alternative, because all else is grey and there can be no other world but what the father interprets. The father rages at these circumstances, at what fate has handed the boy, and at his own helplessness to provide a better life.
Their journey is an epic search for meaning. In fact, if you stripped the entire story down save for the dialogue between the father and son, you would have an existential rhetorical monologue about the meaning of life, a la Waiting for Godot. By the very act of speaking about purpose and reason in life they, however tenuously, conjure up some sense with which to understand their lives. By setting goals they give each other reason to carry on. By struggling to reach the coast--a goal completely arbitrary on a level--they create orientation on a coordinate-less map. The world surrounds them with waste and nothingness and they are without reference save for the reasons they invent themselves. Without a relation to society and a larger world, their isolated state, day after day, becomes a kind of floating eternity. The past and future fade into as hopelessness and monotony reign. There is one myopic state of being--as reflected in the image of the cave in the opening dream sequence: "Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease." Everything--even the sun--has been blotted by the inhospitableness of the times and the grey ash and the world's inhumanity, and the two protagonists are enshrouded in a timeless unknown. With nothing to gauge themselves against, survival--moment by moment--becomes their present state, their means and their end.
This is not the first time McCarthy's books have dealt with the eternal nature of time. Blood Meridian characterized the marauders and the backwater Mexican locals as a people dug up from some long ago era and made to walk the present day. In No Country for Old Men, the cold-blooded Chigurh pontificates about fate in a chilling scene in which his he gambles his victim's life on the flip of a coin. Chigurh theorizes how a person's every action and circumstance have led up to their present state and therefore the present--a pinpoint of accumulated states of being expending itself in a mere flicker of light--contains everything that will ever come to be. And here in The Road, the woman who cares for the boy at the end of the book tells him: ". . . the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time."
The dialogue in The Road is very real and pared down as McCarthy's dialogue always is. The conversation between father and son is often heartfelt and moving. The father takes refuge in his son just as much as the son takes refuge in him, but the father must hold back the full measure of his feelings and the full knowledge of the desperateness of their plight, in order to protect his son from the consciousness of such an unfaceably grim reality. And the father carries that burden with him to the end.
While the character of the father is extremely resourceful, once, when he needed to open a stuck jar and immediately thinks to put it in-between the door jamb and the swinging door and leverage off the top, I thought he was just too crafty. Too ideal. Perhaps McCarthy ought to kick his survivability down half a notch to keep him more real and more understandable and vulnerable.
The father is laconic and manly in a way most of McCarthy's male characters are, including Moss from No Country for Old Men. There are a lot of cowboy hats, cowboy boots and few words. (although not literally in this story)-- that characterizes McCarthy's "real" men.
The other people who show up in the book are interesting too. Like the man who shot the father with the arrow and then was shot with the flare gun. Even his circumstance became pitiable when embraced like a child by the old woman in the room upstairs. Everyone is desperate. They are all clawing pathetically at the last straws of life.
And as with his previous novels, The Road contains a healthy sense of the bizarre. When the father comes across an abandoned drugstore with a cafe bar, complete with barstools, he sees on the counter a cakebell covering a human head: a head wearing a baseball cap of all things!--very grisly and strange. And there were so many good moments. Like the incinerated motorists on the road, like frozen moments in time, like people waiting out eternity, desiccated statues representing one particular encounter with death. And I enjoyed the details. Like the masks worn to protect people from the dust, and the telling detail that the man's mask was bloody from his coughs. And there were touching moments too. Like when the father finds an old Coke to give to his son.
So many questions are asked. We get some answers, but not many. What exactly happened here? Is everyone dead? We don't know. What about life in general? Those things un-human?--the ". . . life in the deep. Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in a cold darkness. Shuttling past like trains, eyes the size of saucers." What became of them?
I read through some of the Amazon reviews and was struck by one in particular in which the reader called the book "trash" because of its fragmented sentence structure. Of course the reply is, That's his style. It doesn't take long to adjust to his writing, and once you do you really connect in with what McCarthy is trying to say, very directly and effectively. And isn't that the purpose of writing?
The book is chilling. Those "bloodcult"-type people. Those poor souls in that basement, helplessly blinking in the dark. The baby on the spit. The poor guy who gets struck by lightening because he wrapped wire around the rags on his feet. Certainly the world is a very cruel place.
One criticism I can levy is that I thought at times McCarthy was too detailed in his descriptions. He used too many names for things the layperson wouldn't know, unless he or she had a particular working, professional-grade knowledge of that object. This is characteristic of McCarthy. Sometimes you ask, Are all these characters just so much more experienced than me? Or is the author flexing his vocabular muscles, and it would be okay to treat stuff in a less masterful way? At times I was too conscious of his handiwork--like a professional plumber telling me in a sober plumber-like tones and in too much detail about a drain I just want cleared. For example, here's a bit of description that reads more like an instruction manual for stoves than a piece of narrative prose:
". . . set about removing one of the burns from the little gimballed stove. He disconnected the braided flexline and removed the aluminum spiders from the burners . . . He unfastened the brass fittings with a wrench and took the burners loose. Then he uncoupled them and fastened the hose to the coupling pipe and fitted the other end of the hose to the gasbottle . . . "
I almost think the next thing he's going to say is, "And continue to step 3 as shown in figure B."
But The Road is certainly a masterful book.
Everything is being lost in this "glaucomic" world. The world is fading. The father dreams of birds flying and of blue skies but he wakes, "Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth." The world is slipping away. He thinks the world is, "like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory."
The father does not even have the luxury of remembering the past. For, "He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on." What is now distorts and mares the memory of what was. What has gone has truly gone. This is perhaps the saddest part of all.
Summary of The Road
A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy?s masterpiece.A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don?t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food?and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, ?each the other?s world entire,? are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it 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.
Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play). Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane
The Road is now a major motion picture based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, starring Academy Award-nominee Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Enjoy these images from the film, and click the thumbnails to see larger images.
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