Summary: moving book, powerful in its simplicity of prose and theme. I understand why it received a Pulitzer. McCarthy is of course an enigmatic and sought-after writer so that enhances the mystique of the book.
The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions... is all that's provided for context. A cataclysm has happened some years before (the boy in the story was born just after the event but is now grade-school age), apocalyptic in its outcome but not the smoking cinder fate of bad sci-fi, more a slow bleeding out of all of the marvels of nature as the world slowly winds down and dies.
The description is congruent with the scientific models of the onset of nuclear winter and failure of the oxygen cycle following a mass nuclear exchange, but the result could have come from a comet/asteroid strike, a volcanic eruption or something else. The mechanism is not that important. Whatever it was has ruined many large cities, permanently darkened the skies and killed all plant and animal life, which means food has run out permanently. Only humans remain, feeding on what they can find, including each other. Days without sun and nights without stars blend together and a permanent winter is settling upon the world. Most importantly, hopelessness has settled as well, and much of humanity has fallen to savagery and cannibalism (Within a year there were fires on the ridge and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered...he thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.)
Against this backdrop a man and his son struggle through the blasted landscape. They have been journeying for years, wandering, hiding, but the winters at their latitude have become too severe and they must move south to have a chance of survival. The man repeats that there may be hope at the coast, but deep down he seems to know that it's just a goal because without some kind of a goal they would be truly lost.
His wife, who delivered the boy just days after the cataclysm occurred (They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight...and watched distant cities burn...A few nights later she gave birth in their bed), has recently taken her own life (I don't care, it's meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I've taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot. she says, speaking of Death).
The boy takes her suicide fatalistically, as he does most of the things they come upon with the exception of a basement full of human cattle being harvested by the cannibal tribes that roam the land feeding on the one renewable foodstuff - human beings. He is the new. He does not know anything else, and to him the skies have always been gray, and people are to be avoided. His father has tried to teach him, but the skills of reading and writing are not nearly as useful as being able to find water or hide quickly and well.
The man is the center of the story - he is the bridge between the old and the new. He has adapted well to the harsh new land but his dreams call him back to the former life, and he sees his father and father's father before him, watching and judging him.
They struggle through the land, and sometimes fortune smiles on them and sometimes it does not. They eventually reach the coast, and part company and the boy goes on his own was as the father always knew he would have to.
It's thinly hidden that this is an allegory about parenting, not just of one's own children but of the precious things that surround us - things we don't appreciate or even notice until they are threatened or destroyed. Once again we see the sentiment of the ennobling powers of parenthood The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. she tells the man during their final, brutal, truthful conversation when she is quitting, and he is not, and she hates him for it but nevertheless cannot continue.
McCarthy writes this novel as a love song in the form of a dirge, not just for his boy but about his own love for the boy. In a deeper sense - and this is what made the novel sing to me, since I don't have that kind of love in my own life - he's writing about fidelity and hope, two essential components of not just parenting but of holding back all of the more subtle forms of destruction constantly encroaching upon the world.
The Road is a deep and moving book, well-written in its simplicity (no names except for the generic "Rock City", though the Wikipedia entry seems to believe the man and his son are moving through Tennessee to the Alabama coast). His words and sentences are short, his character speeches are plaintive and although the man's internal dialogues go on and repeat themselves I find it completely believeable given his horrific situation.
I also find the milieu believeable - if the end comes in this way it won't be A Boy and His Dog or crummy Sci-Fi Channel movies with heavily armed people throwing bad attitudes. It's going to be like this, or most likely Testament; a flash of light, everything goes dead, the food stops coming and then people start to die. That's how it's probably really going down, and with over 10,000 nuclear weapons still on front-line status the dice are still pretty loaded.
Good writing is colorful. Great writing is simple. Less words leave more space for the mind to fill in with imagination, and the experience of imagination well-used is the secret hope of every fiction reader.
I think I will try reading another one of those author's books - if his prose is always this lean and muscular I would really enjoy seeing more of his work. I've previously said that the muse fades with age, as settling down silences the angst that fuels most artistic work. McCarthy is 74 years old and if he can still make time to conjure the muse it gives me some hope.
If you enjoy this genre, here are some books/movies which I have found especially moving:
- Testament - to me the definitive story of this genre.
- The Trigger Effect (all parts without Dermot Mulroney) - removing the craptacular soap-opera scenes, the premise and execution of this movie seem to me like the perfect update to the post-apocalyptic genre.
- The Day After - the original mega-event, but thought-out and resonant even today (although the 1983 effects have lost some of their specialness, Jason Robards and Amy Madigan do some of their best work),
- Miracle Mile - "Oh my god, is this 213?"
- Earth Abides, George R. Stewart - also moving in its simplicity, albeit with a more hopeful message. Compelling in its attention to the small details of life without us (I have not read the more recent book with that title)
- Lucifer's Hammer, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle - Old-school hard sci-fi big-time wrath-of-God type stuff. You can hear Irwin Allen screaming at his secretary to get him the option. Larry and Jerry are the OGs of hard sci-fi and I couldn't consider anything I'd ever be able to add to their genre.
- The Survivalist, Jerry Ahern - campy crap but if you ever want to know what to bring to the apocalypse this is like a product catalog. I devoured these books in high school dreaming of the day when I could afford a pair of Detonics .45s in their Alessi shoulder rigs to go with my Sting Ia black chrome boot knife. I hope Jerry got some bucks for product placement, I used to subscribe to Gun Digest and it never even had that much detail.
