Never-Ending Fire
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage Books, 2007
(287 pages, $14.95, paperback)
reviewed by Robert Elder
As I read The Road, I kept imagining two people sitting on a darkened stage with the ruins of the world around them, one saying, “Everything is gone,” and the other asking, “What is left?” Cormac McCarthy is probably best known for All the Pretty Horses, and for his unflinching commitment to portrayals of human depravity.
His newest novel has been either hailed as the best work of an aging American master or denounced as the betrayal of an existential vision so severe that he is easily in the running for author of the most violent novel in the American canon ( Blood Meridian). I believe it is partly McCarthy’s answer to the question “What is left?” that has split readers’ opinions.
A Dark Vision
Taking place in what appears to be a nuclear winter following a global disaster, The Road follows a man and his son fleeing south through the smoldering remains of the world for reasons unknown to us, and possibly unknown to them. Everything about the novel is stark, yet McCarthy achieves rich descriptions of a dead world using a sparse, muscular style and an evocative vocabulary.
It is not an easy book to read, unrelentingly dark and often searing in its descriptions of the human remnant’s violence and depravity. McCarthy rarely dwells on these horrors, but they allow him to portray an alternative vision that derives much of its power and beauty from the contrast. In the midst of a nearly unbearable outer darkness, he gives his readers refuge in the profoundly simple exchanges between a father and son.
The desolation of a post-Apocalyptic world allows McCarthy to ask complex questions that are nevertheless stark in their moral content: Is one allowed to let another human being starve in order to feed one’s child? Is it wrong to kill a person if by that act you spare him from a certain and more horrible death? Is suicide acceptable when you do it to preserve food and therefore life? Is suicide acceptable when life is, by any standard, not worth living? What is life for?
These are the sorts of questions that crowd McCarthy’s world, questions that his characters are forced to answer without the luxury of equivocation, in a world stripped of the materials modern people use to cover their compromises.
Pragmatism & Purity
In his two characters, McCarthy presents a study of the tension between pragmatism and purity.
Robert Elder is currently writing a dissertation at Emory University on honor culture and Evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth-century American South. He writes the weblog, Clio and Calvin. He lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife Catherine, and is a member of Christ Church Presbyterian.
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