Down “The Road” of love and survival

By Chris Kane

Cormac McCarthy’s newest novel, “The Road,” is an examination of the depth of human love and the will to survive.

It can best be described as epic, a post-apocalyptic tale of the journey of a man and his son through an America of the future that has been reduced to a desolate barren wasteland.

It is in the same vein as McCarthy’s earlier novel, “No Country for Old Men,” in that it juxtaposes the innocent against the evil and chronicles the struggle for survival. However, unlike “No Country” and its ilk, “The Road” does not examine the consequences of avarice but rather focuses on the devotion of a father to his child, set against the backdrop of a world rife with anarchy and chaos.

The main characters (who remain nameless in the novel) are on a quest to reach the sea in hopes of reprieve from their despondent circumstances. They traverse through a countryside ridden with starvation, cannibalism, homelessness and abject poverty. McCarthy hints at a world-ending catastrophe that has decimated most of the human population and all flora and fauna. This has resulted in desperation for food that has driven humans to desperate ends.

The man and his son face all of this as they make their way to the West Coast, a journey that, McCarthy makes clear, is made in vain. The child’s mother has taken her own life because of the hopelessness that filled her life after the clocks stopped and the world as it was formerly known ended.

The novel’s most redeeming quality is the poignancy of the relationship between the protagonists. The father has the strength to carry on that was lacking in his wife, protecting his child from the evils that are abundant in the new world. The child is the element of hope in the novel; he is the embodiment of innocence and integrity. His father says of him “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

The man sacrifices everything to ensure his son’s well-being, neglecting to eat in order to give more to his child. He knows that to give up would be to fail as a parent, and he is able to continue to move toward his goal, however hopeless, despite a crippling illness. This is all the more affecting because there is nothing for the characters to live for, except each other. “There is no later,” McCarthy writes. “This is later.”

McCarthy’s writing is extraordinary. It is beautiful in its simplicity and succinctness. It is almost poetic. Each word seems decisively chosen to convey genuine emotion. “The Road” is sublimely beautiful, despite its stark imagery, brutality and candid truths about the evil that man is capable of. McCarthy compensates for depressing undertones and subject matter with his poetic prose which is simultaneously grand and understated.

“The land was gullied and eroded and barren,” he writes, “The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes. The sullen haze hung over the earth and sky alike. By late afternoon it has begun to snow and they went on with the tarp over them and the wet snow hissing on the plastic.”

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