Prior to The Road, I would not have thought it possible for a story of smoke and ash, fire and death, desolation and despair, to be a story of love. And yet, in the hands of arguably the greatest living American author, all things are possible. Mr. McCarthy, who has, for decades, specialized in bleak landscapes and even bleaker characters, has, here, elevated the here-to-for pulpy post-apocalyptic novel to fine art. It will be a long while before this effort is matched.
All is ashes. From the burned out forests, to the filth-covered fields, from the husks of skeletal cities to the impenetrable gray of polluted skies, the world lies in ruins. How it came to be this way no one knows. For the perpetrators of this collapse are as dead as the warheads they used to achieve it. But then this is not a world that cares about hows; it cannot afford such luxuries. After all, life at the end of the world is all-but consumed by the necessities of survival. For those precious few who have not yet lost their humanity, sustenance is extracted from the remnants of the old world, canned goods that cannot be replicated. For the rest, well, the remains of the children given over to the cooking fires are testament to how far they've fallen.
They may well be the last good guys in the world, two battered, road-weary travelers determined to escape the bitter cold of winter by slowly, painfully walking south, hoping to eventually reach the impossibly distant sea. To get there, the Man and the Boy, who are never named, will have to navigate the eponymous road, what's left of the U.S. highway network which is now a magnet for thieves, cannibals, slavers and lost souls. To protect his son from these myriad threats the Man has only two bullets and an old revolver with which to fire them. But even the gun is, in the end, only a threat. He cannot waste his precious ammunition on road agents. No, these bullets must be preserved, insurance against a dark day in which, on the brink of being taken by slavers or worse, he will use them to remove himself and his son from this cruel world, allowing both of them to follow in the footsteps of the boy's mother who gave up when things were considerably brighter than they are now. Will these two wandering souls make it to the sea? If they do, will it offer them succor, or has it joined the rest of the world in being swallowed by man's depravities?
Though The Road exhibits many of Mr. McCarthy's customary themes, desolate landscapes, hopeless endeavors, periods of explosive violence, it is easily his simplest and his most loving effort. Absent here is the philosophical complexity of Blood Meridian, or the vastness and the emotion of his Borderlands Trilogy. Here, there is, in the main, a father's love for his son, his need to protect him, to give him a chance at life, to give him hope for the future, and to impart to him an example of human decency that will endure beyond the Man's inevitable death. Underlying this core relationship, however, is the central question Mr. McCarthy puts to the reader.
At what point is life no longer worth living?
The Road presents us with two answers to this question. The Boy's mother argues that nothing is gained from persisting in the face of oblivion. After all, what's the point? Is it so that you can say, with pride, that you lasted longer than your fellows, that you tried harder, dug deeper, that you refused to capitulate? What does any of that matter when you're dead? You're better off surrendering to the night and hoping that the universe proffers us a second chance at life somewhere else.
But if we always yield to the inevitable, the Man counters, how can we ever make life better? If there's no point to spitting in the face of the impossible, how do oppressive regimes get overthrown? How are injustices set right? How are prejudices eliminated in the pursuit of an improved, enlightened species? It may be that doom is inevitable, but if we always surrender to the inevitable then we're nothing more than machines performing cost benefit analysis. Perhaps believing that our fortitude sets an example for those who come next is a conceit we use to drive ourselves onward, but on the off-chance that it isn't, on the off-chance that there is a next generation of us that takes hold, that resurrects the world, then our example of persistence in the face of the impossible will aid in making that a reality.
The Road is a masterwork. Mr. McCarthy's characteristically spare prose is a perfect compliment to his grim setting. More over, in a story with only two substantive characters and very little in the way of action, he succeeds in thoroughly entertaining his readers by connecting them to both the survivalist philosophy that underpins the plot and the post-nuclear environment that enshrouds it. All this with an adroitness of language and a subtlety of storytelling that left me in awe. Few of us will ever write like this, with such simplicity, grace, beauty, and love. Such rare gems must be properly admired. (5/5 Stars)
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