The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Slow and half opaque. The wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing. Gray slush by the roadside. Black water running from under the sodden drifts of ash. No more balefires on the distant ridge.

Desolate country. A boar-hide nailed to a barndoor. Ratty. Wisp of a tail. Dried and dusty among the wan slats of light.

Though the descriptions are vivid, there is a poetic restraint and understatement that runs throughout Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

The country is America, but one can only guess at what happened to this once land of plenty. The post-apocalyptic landscape is barren and charred. It is cold. The sky is bruised and thick. Ash blocks out the sunlight and blankets the ground.
The snow is gray.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here.

An unnamed father and his young son, who have their devotion to each other and little else, trek across country in the grim aftermath of a cataclysmic event. Struggling to stay warm, scavenging for food, searching for shelter, hiding from lawless bands who have resorted to horrific extremes in order to survive, the father and son follow The Road that will lead them to the sea.
They don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there.

McCarthy is a master at his craft, where all is intentional:
brief and fragmented paragraphs, lack of punctuation, the sentence structure, the word arrangement…all visual cues on the actual page reinforcing the sparseness of the scorching dialogue and the bleakness of the events that unfold.

…knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? He whispered. Will I see you at the last?
He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian.
Can I ask you something? he said.
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
Okay.

Can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course you can.
What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.

But in a world in which all hope has been lost, McCarthy, in the heart-wrenching ending, does offer a final glimmer of hope. This is a tale of solitary desperation, but also of faith, hope, and love. It is a sparse and grim novel, but there is a poignant beauty and poetic elegance that comes out of the stark simplicity of this profound work.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a book you will not soon forget.



On a related note, the Coen Brothers new film No Country for Old Men, based on McCarthy's novel of the same name, opens May 2007 at the Cannes Film Festival.