Feb 03 2008
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Set in a post-apocalypse world, still smouldering, ash-strewn, cluttered with junk remains of human civilisation, a man and his son travel along a road, heading south and west, away from winter and towards the ocean.
Through a narrative as sparse and disconnected as the landscape, yet at turns violently beautiful and exquisitely poetic, we watch as man and boy forage for food and equipment, make shelter for the night and cook what they’ve found over mean little fires. The darkness is always around them, it’s always cold, and there’s the danger of getting soaked. There’s also the threat of other people too, the ‘bad guys’.
And there are dreams. The man warns about dreams. The better they are, the more you should be alarmed. ‘How else would death call you?’ the man thinks. He also dreams about the boy’s mother. She gave birth the same day they saw the flash of light that began the end of the world. She is not with them on the road, and the reason she is not with them is one of the weaknesses of this story.
There are other lesser failures too, such as the continued presence of ash and fire from the original event — this, six or seven years before the time of the story. The dependence of the man and the boy on remnants of food and equipment from the old world is another failure: the survivor story can only work for a season or two, not for six years. Pretty soon Robinson Crusoe had to stop retrieving bits and pieces from the wreck of the ship and start relying on himself and what he could find living in the world. Adapt or perish, that’s the law of nature.
Despite these misgivings, and they are serious affronts to a reader’s credibility, the power of the narrative is so great, the world so bleak, the absence of hope so overpowering that the reader marches along anyway, swept on, keeping pace with the protagonists, suffering every step and rewarded by every extraordinary sentence, desperate to know ‘what happens’.
What happens is the final and most telling weakness of the story. What happens is a redemption, of sorts, arguably absurd in the face of such overwhelming nihilism. In the mind of this reader anyway, this sense of hope is utterly inconsistent with all the despair and lack of trust that has preceded it.
More importantly, ‘what happens’ at the end of the story is not a consequence of any decision of the two protagonists, nor is it linked in a causal way to any event, character, or fictional motif or any other literary device in the story. What happens is a kind of much-desired, undeserved and unexpected, merciful redemption. The problem with this kind of conclusion in fiction is that a redemption resolution must have its roots in the earlier part of the narrative. It must still be a consequence of some position or action or choice. Otherwise, it’s simply deus ex machina.
For some, any kind of hopeful ending will suffice and reward. Others, like me, might feel they have been short-changed. McCarthy set himself perhaps the hardest modernist challenge: to write about a holocaust, about the end of everything. In my opinion, he fails the challenge. Somewhere in the writing of this book, the writer’s apparent pessimism turned to obvious optimism. What happens is what I can only describe as a Hollywood ending.
The Road’s failure to carry through the implications of the world it creates but instead to present a reassuring and safe conclusion to the narrative is, I am afraid, cowardly. It may be a crowd-pleaser. It may be a publisher-pleaser. Undoubtedly, the writing is absolutely magnificent. But as a piece of fiction, it is a failure.
“He also dreams about the boy’s mother. She gave birth the same day they saw the flash of light that began the end of the world. She is not with them on the road, and the reason she is not with them is one of the weaknesses of this story.”
This is not a weakness, but a strength. The reason is there, read it again. Her death, and the circumstances of it, make her a foil to the man.
She “died the day he was born” and years later decided to take her own life in hope of “eternal nothingness”. “A shard of obsidian an atom thick.” She wanted to put an end to their suffering then and there. The man, however, saw every bit goodness of left in the world, a shining beacon of light and purity, the boy. He chose to live and suffer for the boy. For hope. She ended her life (and would have ended the boy’s too) out of the fear of the eternal air of nothingness that pervaded almost every bit of the new world and mankind. She fell to what the man resisted the entire length of the story, the central conflict of the entire work. To struggle and persist against the depravity of mankind, and the dieing world around them or to simply end it. The man kept his hope. The mother gave it up.
Jeff, I agree that the central message in the book is that you have to keep going. I went back and found this on p. 145:
“This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up.”
And, yes, I realise her action hammers home the hopelessness in the most direct way possible. It could not be more bleak. But I just did not think it was believable. I broke out of the bubble of fiction. In most animal and human behaviours, the mother would continue to fight until her final breath. So I thought it was a weakness in the story, even though it is beautifully and compellingly written.
A writer constructs a world in order to show us something about what it means to be human. If we go with the constructed world, if we stay in the bubble, we can go with the work. If we rebel and the bubble breaks there may be problems. I rebelled. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t like the book. It is a remarkable piece of writing, powerful and thought-provoking. All good, even if I disagreed with that aspect.