Review: The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's apocalypse novel is a masterclass in dialogue and characterisation. Treading slowly through a razed land, a man and his son who was born post-fallout have one goal: get to the ocean.
Content Warning: This review contains upsetting topics.
Ecocritical Themes
The novel explores how society in modern America was no longer subject to the natural world around it, but to the manmade landscape. I believe this novel depicts a version of hubris, in an ecological sense, in which human society learns that it hasn't tamed nature at all. Here and there, hints of surviving nature call to the humans like lifelines, only to exact revenge on the world that burnt it to the ground.
Weather is ruthless, and shelter scarce. Rain and snow have no shame in falling on their damp, starved bodies, and falls without a second glance. Th dialogue between humanity and nature had been one-sided since humans began to see it as a frontier, a conflict. As soon as that relationship breaks down, it seems like the dialogue flips, and nature screams into every moment of peace.
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes with the backs of his hands. What is it? he said. What is it, Papa?
Come on. We have to move.
What is it?
It's the trees. They're falling down.
The Boy
The unnamed boy was born after the beginning of the unexplained apocalyptic event which left the country without electricity, burning, and populated with roaming cannibal gangs. All he knew of the world before his birth is from his father's stories, but they are merely recreations, which the man acknowledges. It poses the question: why talk about the past if it doesn't exist anymore, and cannot exist during our (or the next) lifetime?
The boy is born into a world that has abandoned morals and ethics, yet he is the voice of empathy to contrast his father's instincts for survival. Their reason for staying alive is the fact that together, they maintain what little is left of humanity: they carry the fire.
It's ironic that fire is still a symbol of hope throughout the novel. Fire was the element that destroyed the world and their hopes of survival, and fire is often a bad omen, campfires mean that others are around and more often than not, it's the cannibals they are trying to avoid.
The boy has a strong voice in the narrative, advocating for others that they meet on their journey, like an elderly man dressed in rags who the man comes to realise might be an angel or a god, and this a test. The most touching encounter, however, is when the boy believes he has found another child, who runs out of sight and never returns. The boy's fixation with him, always asking to turn around, worrying that he's alone, conveys a mistimed search for kindred spirits along the blank slate of the country. A boy born in isolation can only look for himself.
What if that little boy doesn't have anybody to take care of him? he said. What if he doesn't have a papa?
The boy is proof that there must still be morality, empathy, and kindness, even in the apocalypse.
Could you do it? When the time comes?
McCarthy presents the reader with a protagonist who fights every day, who admits that the bravest he has ever been was getting up in the morning, but he will not fight his enemies. He can't. He is starving, weakened by sickness and toil. The road is a fine line--a tightrope--between giving up entirely, and fighting to the inevitable death, and the man walks down it every day with a child in tow. It's an upsettingly sympathetic position to be in, overpowered by the world in every direction and taking every crumb of grace the can get with a wary look around before snapping it up.
I wouldn't say it reduces them to animals, that would be unfair. It goes to show that there is no heroism in fighting a fight you know you can't win, if the consequence is leaving your child at the mercy of the villains who killed you, knowing they will do so much worse to him.
There are few flashbacks in the novel but the most upsetting has to do with where the second bullet went in the gun. There were originally three, one of which was inexplicably wasted, and in the flashback the boy's mother fights for her right to commit suicide. Despite his protestations, the man cannot stop her or blame her for throwing herself towards the losing side. Left with one bullet between the two of them, the man resolves to never have to use it.
The novel is full of shocking revelations, and some which the less-optimistic reader would have seen from miles away, but the one that made me have to pause occurred around halfway through, when the man and boy discover a basement full of imprisoned people, belonging to one of the cannibal gangs who come down on them. While hiding in the field, the man reminds the boy how to use the gun. it appears the long-awaited time has come to use it:
If they find you you are going to have to use it. Do you understand? Shh. No crying. You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point it up.
One thing had been clear from the beginning of the story. If either of them were to die, the other would soon also die, but the man would only allow the boy to die first. Their situation was almost impossible to survive, but it would be impossible to bear for the boy alone. It's a chilling, awfully realistic detail to include: the preparation of a young child for taking his own life.
The world has no heroes. Previously I talked about how the two are the last of true humanity, but McCarthy crushes that notion with his fist in this passage: there are no heroes. Hope is the lie that keeps us from ending the story too soon.
Conclusion
I started this review planning to discuss the dialogue choices McCarthy used to build up the relationship between the man and the boy, but I admit I got a little carried away. Even 2 weeks after finishing reading I am still overcome with emotion thinking about it, which is a good sign for the book's rating, but not for my motivation to re-read this novel. For any writer, I think it's a very important book. It's an icon for setting-building, writing seemingly repetitive scenes without feeling repetitive, and also writing difficult relationship dynamics, non-linear time, even fourth-wall breaks that pose actual important questions to the readers.
It's impossible to give it below a perfect score for that reason.