We all have a very good idea of how the world is going to end: amid
torrents of sulfur and brimstone, tidal waves of flame, an
armageddon of carnage. Apocalypse might come in the form of an
incurable pandemic, a cataclysmic meteor hitting the Earth, or some
destructive variant of Mother Nature's wrath that will cauterize
the terrain and wipe out most of humankind. This will usher in the
collapse of governments and societies as we know it, and the
unfortunate few who will be left behind will be forced to take up
arms and relapse into a primitive and pernicious brutality in order
to survive. Even these, however, will come to pass as the
inevitable destruction of everything and anything becomes more and
more imminent.
Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, undertakes the difficult
and ultimately bleak task of contemplating the end of, well, the
world. In this novel, McCarthy presents to us a dying Father and
his Son, and their heartbreaking struggles in the irrevocably
damaged landscape of a post-apocalyptic, unnamed country that has
succumbed to an abominable nuclear winter. Armed with a pistol that
has only two bullets and chased by degenerate marauders, other
survivors who have turned to thievery and cannibalism, the Father
and Son plod together desperately to the coast on the far side of
the country, on the blind and perhaps foolish hope that they will
be able to glimpse something-anything-other than gray snow, melted
stumps of buildings, mummified corpses on the road, and ashes of
what was once civilization.
The Road, like McCarthy's other works such as Blind Meridian or No
Country for Old Men, is a challenging read. Rivaling the hand of
even the foremost master of apocalyptic writing, Samuel Beckett,
McCarthy's minimalist style, influenced greatly by Hemingway,
shines brightly and consistently throughout the novel, but which in
turn makes it deceptively simple. He paints the calamitous state of
things in stark, unflinching language that is terrifyingly
beautiful and endurable only because of its integrity, as when he
describes the overcast days and nights as "sightless and
impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening…. No
sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees."
Underneath his lucid, lilting prose, his spartan paragraphs, and
his short, seemingly innocuous episodes lies perhaps the greatest
truth of the book: that life, especially a dying life, is hardly
neat or simple. On the contrary, the closer one stands to the face
of death, the more morally complex one's thoughts and decisions
become. Indeed, as the Father comes to realize that his bloody
coughing fits will soon take him, he begins to seriously reconsider
if his moral obligation to protect his son extends to killing him
instead of letting him be eaten by the cannibals around them. In
the end, a father's got to do what a father's got to do.
Perhaps it is on this unabashedly moral point that The Road
succeeds immensely. It is not merely some Camusian commentary on
the bleakness and futility of human existence. Evil exists, and in
this context, evil is triumphant. In this make-believe but
thoroughly believable world, visions of a society and its people
reduced to rubble and moral bankruptcy are absurd. What is even
more absurd, however, is how two people's love for each other can
see them through even the most nightmarish things the world throws
at them, and how it can sustain them enough to believe that their
years-long journey will end in anything but despair and defeat. As
one reads the book, one begins to wonder where the long and
difficult journey in the novel will end. At the end of the road,
one realizes that it only leads to one place: hope.