22nd May 2008
The Road
There’s nothing more to say about this book, it’s true. Yet I also believe my reading experience is enhanced by a multitude of ideas around a single work.
This is the book your creative writing teacher wants you to write. It is sparse, and the verbs are active. Epic without being overwritten, it has a verbal landscape that exactly mirrors the charred country the protagonists traverse.
Yes, it’s apocalyptic; yes, it’s man versus man — along with man versus nature (himself?). It is every paranoid’s fantasy taken to its impossible, right-around-the-corner conclusion. It is predictable in this way.
You won’t care.
This is a story of love and commitment under the harshest imaginable conditions. Our unnamed heroes walk on, always at the brink of unthinkable deaths, and still there are lessons, a father’s lessons, his legacy to his son, a son’s lessons of innocence for his father.
Most of the insights of the father go unspoken, however: “The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone.”
McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks to mark dialogue. His commas are so infrequent, you almost believe they’re completely absent (on two full pages of complicated sentences, I counted two). All of the -n’t contractions lack their apostrophes. Many to-be verbs are just missing. Civilization has broken down completely, and with it all order, says McCarthy with these omissions.
The placement of text on the pages — lone paragraphs and vacant expanse of page — contribute to the barren landscape of the characters’ worlds.
A paragraph separated by breaks on either side:
In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.
I had to read this paragraph several times, inserting mental commas as I went. I enjoyed every reading of it more than the last.
What do you want when there’s nothing left to want? Who do you trust when there’s nobody left to trust and the rules you learned to live by no longer fit — how would you even figure out who to trust? What would you do — or not do — to survive?
These are worn out questions that are haunting and dusty and new and familiar in The Road.
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