The Road By Cormac Mc Carthy
Mc Carthy’s new masterpiece is a road trip, albeit a scary and nightmarish one, by a father and his young son as they trudge from the mountains to the coast in a post-apocalyptic world reduced to ashes and ruins. It’s an unremittingly bleak landscape evoked in stripped-down prose so characteristic of the author’s style in which darkness and grotesqueness are the norm, a world peopled by “men who would eat your children in front of your eyes” and looters who look like “shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”
In this excruciatingly lonely journey, all the father and the son, “the good guys,” have is their unconditional love for each other. Cold, hunger and despair are present every inch of their journey to test their faith and the sheer will to live and love each other.
The evocation of the barren landscape stalked by starving cannibals turns out to be a succession of prose poems and imbue the novel with biblical resonance. “The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp,” the author writes.
In this unforgiving desolate world “the frailty of everything” is revealed at last and “old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.”
The only thing that sustains the father is a transcendental faith to keep his son alive and hopeful that outshines implacable darkness and “the crushing black vacuum of the universe” they have been plunged into. “My job is to take care of you,” he tells his son. “I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.”
When his son asks, in moments of genuine confusion, “Are we still the good guys?,” the good father replies: “This is what good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up.”
In the end, McCarthy’s characters are alone and lost in scenery devoid of colour, painted in whites, blacks and grey, devastated by a nuclear war and now hounded by violent cannibals.
McCarthy’s eloquent use of Biblical myths, invoking Hemingway’s vision and Faulkner’s prose, classical allusions, brings to mind Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Godot’s endless waiting is replaced by an endless walking. There is no hope of being rescued and there is an acknowledgment of a death awaiting them. Surviving amidst the physical and moral annihilation, the boy and the man are each other’s desperate prayer in this holocaust, existing solely on tenderness and love.
Despite the lack of a historical context, the novel underscores the ephemeral nature of our existence and survival and takes us down the road where we would rather not go and forces us to think about questions we don’t want to ask. Publishers Weekly calls it the “closest thing in American Literature to an Old Testament prophet…” A page-turner despite the harrowing reality and grim vision it presents.
Author Profile
- Manish Chand is Founder-CEO and Editor-in-Chief of India Writes Network (www.indiawrites.org) and India and World, a pioneering magazine focused on international affairs. He is CEO/Director of TGII Media Private Limited, an India-based media, publishing, research and consultancy company.
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