The Road

Yet another bit of bleakness from Cormac McCarthy, only this time, his preoccupation with the menacing, superficial simplicity of Appalachian backwater towns or the dark peculiarities rife along the untamed frontiers of the American West has been exchanged for a speculative vision of humanity's trajectory that takes the shape of a grimy and dolorous nightmare-scape that is the post-Apocalyptic world. This is a place filled with desperate men and women willing to commit horrible, brutal, unspeakable acts of cruelly upon their fellow survivors in order to prolong their own miserable existence for a few more days or weeks or months.

Whereas ignorance or pointed closed-mindedness are the major forces of social and interpersonal corrosion and disunity in much of his earlier work, uncertainty is the primary psychological motivator in "The Road". Like poison ink, it seeps into the considerations of both the reader and characters populating the pages of the narrative. There is uncertainty about what caused a cataclysm of such biblical proportions, an event that has burned the earth and sky and made ash rain over the cold grey wastes. Uncertainty also dominates the precarious considerations about where to go to find food, shelter or other survivors who won't eat or enslave you. In this sense, it motivates the Father, our protagonist, to action.

Of even greater mortal concern are the different ways that the survivors go about trying to eek out an existence as they learn to embrace suffering. There are those who opt for the use of force and enslave others and those that chose a nomadic path of foraging and scrounging. There are hints of survivors that have chosen a sort of cooperative collectivism as well as those dedicated to charnel house cannibalism. Each lifestyle represents a response to the insidious doubt plaguing the survivors.

"What does it take to survive in a lawless society without any semblance of infrastructure?" is a question that bitterly divides the remnants of humanity living on this dark, cold and dirty husk of a planet. Hope has forsaken the denizens of Earth and now they must make do or become like the world around them and die. The book is a sort of thought experiment that delves deep into darker realms of the human psyche as both the reader and the characters are forced to confront the idea, "what wouldn't you do to survive?" multiple times throughout the story.

Like most (if not all) of his other books, "The Road" is also a study of violence, it's practical use and how it motivates us (to fight, to flee, to embrace it as a tool, to "rise above" it's use, etc.). And McCarthy still manages to find new ways to shock and disturb his readers, even after the Judge and the Glanton Gang, Lester Ballard and Anton Chigurh.

Unlike most of his other work, we see the author empathizing to a greater degree with his protagonist. There is a definite autobiographical component/feel to "Suttree". If Cornelius Suttree is really a (thinly veiled) re-creation (or re-imagining) of a younger Cormac McCarthy, the Father in "The Road" may very well be a vehicle for an older McCarthy to express himself and his worldview and relative concerns/preoccupations as a old man and new father. In this way, the Father's uncertainty and fear are also the author's and that makes the prose more heartfelt.

As a tangent, after devouring this book and immersing myself in it's "doom and gloom" dytopic aesthetic, I find myself hoping against hope that McCarthy will someday write a novel about Zombies. A guy can dream!