The Road is a great Gregorian chant of a novel.
A man and his young boy are on the road. What has put them there? Something’s gone horribly wrong. The world as we know it has been destroyed. The earth itself is dying. Trees crashing at the two traveler feet. There are no communities, only nomads and clusters of individuals who have formed bands. Man and boy are crossing this bleak landscape trying to make it to the Coast, a place where possibly, just possibly, there may be some temporary relief.
It is written in an intense, poetic style that flickers in and out of the consciousness of the nameless man. There is a brittle urgency to the task of reaching the coast and its the man’s unshiftable, indefatigable love for his son that impels them.
The man avoids reflecting on the past – it has become irrelevant. This keeps the reader speculating as to where the man and boy came from, what is their background, and what ended the world – a good page-turning plot device. Here’s a sample extract:
Did you have any friends?
Yes, I did.
Lots of them?
Yes.
Do you remember them?
Yes, I remember them.
What happened to them?
They died.
All of them?
Yes. All of them.
Do you miss them?
Yes. I do.
Where are we going?
We’re going south.
Okay.
They were all day on the long black road, stopping in the afternoon to eat sparingly from their meager supplies.
.
This purity of line is enhanced by McCarthy’s stylistic device of no speech punctuation, only line breaks and, wherever possible, the removal of apostrophes (so dont rather than don’t etc). It gives a sense of leanness in keeping with the pervading sense of deprivation in the novel. The ‘objective correlative’ technique is used often – placing the emotion in description or action or surrounding rather than merely expressing it as ‘I was tired’ ‘I was fearful’ etc.
The ending is surprisingly upbeat. The man dies but not before finding some ‘good guys’ to look after his son.
Where, philosophically, does the novel stand? What, if anything, is the author trying to say? The novel has a feel of the Absurd to it. There are similarities with The Plague by Albert Camus. Camus there focused on the striving -of groups as well as individuals – in the face of apparent futility. Elsewhere in the Absurd School, say, with Samuel Beckett in Waiting For Godot, there is a form of hopeless optimism; people trapped by circumstance and having to take life or death decisions with no certainty that they are the right ones also resembles the plight described in Les Mains Sales/Dirty Hands by JP Sartre.
The Road‘s resonance today is clearly due to a great extent to its prophecy of a doomed landscape – a warning of the consequences of, well, my chief suspects are global warming or nuclear Armageddon. The pervading hostility of the surviving individuals suggests a rugged Wild West individualism is core to human beings/human society. Yet the collaborative, redemptive ending gives hope that such a vision, though pervasive, might not prevail.
(Imagining the author: he might be some old guy at a bar late at night close to chuck-out time, who tells you we’re all doomed, but makes sure you have the taxi fare home.)