That Which Survives

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a story of the survival, if not the triumph, of the best part of human nature at a time when the worst part of human nature predominates. Though dark and at times shattering in its emotional impact, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is at the same time lyrical, uplifting and ultimately optimistic in its viewpoint.

The story is set in a post-Apocalyptic, near-future America where ash constantly falls from the sky and everything is dead save a few scattered people. Most of these have descended into a state of marauding savagery marked by theft, enslavement, murder and cannibalism. There are some, though, that have retained some sense of morality and compassion and the chief exemplars of this are the unnamed Man and his unnamed young Son. They wander the devastated landscape with their possesions piled into a shopping cart, searching abandoned towns and isolated homes for canned food and any other items that might help them survive. But their wanderings are not without purpose: the man is gradually leading his son down "the road" to the sea, though what they hope to find there is never explicitly articulated. As they make their way towards the coast, they cross paths with a number of marauders and these encounters are always tense and frequently horrifying.

The power of this book lies in its ability to evoke incredibly complex emotions and reactions in the reader and this is due to the author's mastery of language. Cormac McCarthy has the amazing ability to make even the most dire experiences sound like poetry. Here's an example: "He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and dull despair. The world shrinking down around a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

Yet despite the bleak reality of their existence, the dominant emotion expressed in The Road is love...specifically, the love of a father for his child...and with this comes hope, the key to survival. All of this is expressed in dialogue which, unlike the prose, is simple and to the point, yet powerful in its ability to encapsulate the feelings and implications beneath the words: "This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up." The man is so patient, so reassuring, so outwardly together even when he's inwardly despairing, that he imparts the will to survive and to thrive within the boy as well as himself. Both he and the boy "carry the fire."

The Road is soon to be released as a movie starring Viggo Mortenson, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, and Robert Duvall. I know I'm going to see it. Maybe I'll even like it; I loved the film version of McCarthy's other latter-day masterpiece, No Country For Old Men. But there's no substitute for a good book and a healthy imagination. So do yourself a favor: before you buy the movie tickets, check out and read a copy of The Road. You won't be sorry!