‘Road’ charts dad’s fight to save son
“The Road”
by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf, 256 pages, $24)
The fear lurking in our subconscious since Sept. 11 has become a novel.
Of all the horrors imagined in a world gone berserk with WMDs and apocalyptic religiosity and God-loving mass murder, Cormac McCarthy exploits the most haunting: a father’s fear that he can no longer protect his child from what’s surely coming.
“The Road” describes a father’s faltering, harrowing struggle to lead his 8-year-old son through the ruined and smoldering aftermath of something terrible.
McCarthy never says quite what. His apocalypse is distilled to a single paragraph: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear light and then a series of low concussions.” And then came a “dull rose glow in the windowglass.”
The novel is set eight years after that event, during the journey of the father and a son who has never lived in a world without wildfire and ash and anarchy, has never been able to trust a stranger or to befriend another child.
Their months-long march south toward the Gulf of Mexico takes them across a deteriorating, corpse-littered American landscape bereft of crops and forests and animals. They scavenge for the last remnants of canned foods, the last few quarts of fuel.
And all the poetic skills that McCarthy displayed in such work as “All The Pretty Horses,” in which he transformed sandy deserts into beautiful landscapes with vivid colors, have been turned upside down. His passages now tell of a catastrophic wasteland and air so thick that survivors must wear cloth masks over their faces to filter grime from the gray air.
Father and son move through a smoking, looted land, most of the population dead, most of the survivors starving and shorn of pity. It’s a world “largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and cities themselves 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.”
As civilization slides backward into savagery, the father struggles to balance a moral code against the selfish demands of survival. “We’re the good guys, aren’t we Papa?” the little boy keeps asking.
Amid such bleak circumstances, McCarthy has woven a story of astounding power of paternal love. It is a brutal, affecting, harrowing read, but you keep reading, drawn through the ashen darkness by one of the great writers of contemporary fiction, scavenging for the morsels of hope along the way.
McCarthy assigns no blame to a particular government or nation or religion or inept leader for a future that may be fast coming. A reader is free to blame whatever or whomever he wants for a world pushed beyond the brink.
Nor does McCarthy give the father a name. He is simply “the man.”
But the reader, his own personal post-Sept. 11 dread firmly in mind, knows to assign his own name to the man.