The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Post-Apocalypse (2006 - 287 pp.)
Cormac McCarthy's
The Road became
a feature film within three years of its release (2009). I saw it when it came out, at the
Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto. Usually, I read a book before watching the movie. In the case of
The Road, watching the movie first helped me read the book.
The Road follows the lonely story of a man and his son travelling by foot across an unnamed portion of a post-apocalyptic United States of America. No character is ever named, even in memories, but there's never an everyman feel to The Road because of how non-relatable the experience is. The Road is perhaps best told as a movie, aside from Viggo Mortensen's terrific acting job, because of how blurred together the various buildings and stretches of road become in McCarthy's novel. McCarthy's dialogue and imagery are intense, drawing the reader into the story, but in a disembodied way that makes it feel like the reader is never really in those haunted houses or huddled under a beaten-up scrap of tarp.
McCarthy's refusal to reveal the cause of the apocalypse is crucial to
The Road's appeal, yet he weaves the story so vividly I never bother to wonder what happened. Different eras worry about different apocalypses, from
foreign takeover to
mutually assured destruction to
who knows what. The unstated apocalypse of
The Road focuses instead on the contrast between the before times, which the father remembers constantly but exist only as a haze to the son, and the after times, which are so rife with danger that survival is the only goal. When the father recalls the before times early on, when the mother is still alive, "She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame." (19) McCarthy presents it as though it is a still from an old movie, the film wearing away with time as the owner frets over losing a memory. The after times are so bereft of options that the reader never stops to wonder what the father used to do for a living or where the son would have gone to school.
The Road must have been simultaneously easy and difficult to write: easy in that a lot of character background can be omitted, difficult in that each scene has to shuffle the deck in terms of ways to portray life on the eponymous road.
The tensest moments are when the father and the son encounter other people. The floor hatch scene, (in)famous for how scary it is in the movie, makes the reader's heart beat faster just as the characters' hearts do. For all the monotony that most of the road entails, the main challenge being the stripped-down version of nature the characters endure, human threats present some of the greatest difficulties: "Run, he whispered. We have to run." (111) Conversely, the father and the son stay for short stretches in various abandoned houses, where the presumably deceased former inhabitants leave behind canned foods for our heroes' taste treats. Coca-Cola, canned pears, and canned tuna are among the best finds. As
canned food evolves, a more futuristic take on
The Road could feature anything from canned tom yum to canned butter chicken soup - but that would be cold (heated-up?) comfort to future characters.
For all the harshness of nature, whether it's the burnt-out ex-farmland or the oncoming winter, wildlife never seem to be a concern. Bears and wolves, if they still exist, don't appear tempted by the stacks of supplies people leave out while they go for walks on the beach. Humans, not animals, are the scavengers. The lack of corporeal wildlife makes the mere mention of animals as a conversation topic into spiritual subject matter. When the father and the son discuss the phrase "as the crow flies", the conversation quickly turns toward crows' lack of need to follow the road, charting their paths all over (but not as far as Mars), prompting the boy to ask: "If you were a crow could you fly up high enough to see the sun?" (158) It's refreshing to see some of the
world's smartest avians presented as stand-ins for dreams of freedom rather than as
stand-ins for death. Euphemistically left out of the corvid banter is that if people, who can open cans for food, are so starving, crows' situations must be at least as bad, if not worse.
The relationship between
The Road's characters and freedom is a strained one. With society destroyed, there's no one left to tax, compel, or otherwise corral the characters. There's also nothing left to fight for. There's no freedom
to do anything, as anything worth doing is irreparably lost, like a
Toronto Raptors game during the COVID-19 pandemic but for all time. It also means that anytime a possession is lost, whether it's an article of clothing or a frying pan, replacing that item is a morbid scavenger hunt. Some of the people the father and son pass on the road stink and are wearing rags.
Amorality reigns in
The Road, but the father grounds the son by repeatedly insisting that they're "the good guys". The bad guys are highway robbers, so by refusing to rob from others, or
do anything worse, while repelling any robbers they meet, the father and the son become good guys by default. The son, who has few memories of the before times, ingrains the good guys/bad guys duality as his morality, in the absence of anything else. Near the end of the book, he asks a kindly stranger on the beach:
How do I know youre** one of the good guys?
The stranger answers:
You dont. You'll have to take a shot. (283)
The guessing game the father and son play - deciding which houses to enter, which people to approach or avoid, which places to sleep - is totally encapsulated in those two lines.
Neither good nor bad,
The Road is verbose. McCarthy uses words I didn't know frequently enough that I didn't bother looking up many of them, as I can generally tell what he means through context. Sometimes, the terminology creates a darkly medical atmosphere, as in
"rachitic"; at other times, entire sentences are composed mainly of 7+ letter words. The density of the language adds to the book's dreamlike quality, as a first-person narrator would never describe the world with such arcaneness.
My emotional connection to the book revolves around the growing awareness of just how much I have, as does everyone I know. Something as mundane as a dish towel - there are four of them hanging in front of my oven - borders on unthinkable in
The Road's world. I'm surrounded by outlets, which power all manners of electrical devices that occupy my time during the stay at home order; in
The Road, electrical power is non-existent. When I lock my door, I feel content that I'm safe from whomever may lurk beyond my premises... but, as in
post-apocalyptic fiction more generally,* the father and the son don't even feel safe when they're barricaded in a basement.
They have nothing, yet the pass the time they have,
just like we all do. I'm just thankful for all the lighting, shelter and fresh food.
Ease of Reading: 8
*Now there's a good novel study project: comparing the highway robbers in The Road to the vampires in I Am Legend.
**At various points, McCarthy omits apostrophes in contractions. It makes the book feel more scrawled down, although the presence of apostrophes in other places confuses the matter.
