The Road

I finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road on Wednesday night, and lay in bed, moved more than I’d been by a book in a long time. On Thursday morning, as I’m wont to do after finishing a book or watching a movie, I checked out Metacritic and a few other reviews on the web…and found that numerous of these reviews said things like, “I was moved more by this book than anything I’ve read in years.”

So, it looks like I’m not alone.

The book tells the story of an unnamed man and his unnamed son, walking down a road in a post-Apocalyptic America. The story never really tells what has occurred, save for one memory of some concussed explosions that suggest the otherwise implied nuclear horror. It’s a good thing that geopolitics don’t factor in here, because that’s not even remotely the point. The two walk through a burnt landscape, the sun blacked out by the ash that rains through the sky. The boy, born just after the world changed forever, has never seen the sun, grass, animals, and barely ever seen other children.

McCarthy paints a gruesome picture, but one that is haunting and heart-breaking. Without plant and animal life, the options for food are scavenging through abandoned homes or – a horror I’d never thought of but is all too plausible – kidnapping other survivors in order to eat them.

It’s this last reality that has the man carrying a pistol with two bullets, something we realize is just as much for protection as to kill themselves before subjecting themselves to being a cannibal’s dinner. What lies at the heart of this is the man’s unyielding love for his son. The boy, who is somewhere around eight or ten years old, is constantly searching for a morality in a world that essentially has none. He asks “We’re the good guys, right?” more than once, and it’s not a silly question as the two are forced into doing things that seem to question this assumption regularly.

But what took me by such surprise was the tenderness McCarthy shows in the man’s love for his son. As an author who writes regularly about the brutality of man, and death, and everything in between, I was never prepared for passages like this one, which comes as the two realize they are in harms way from a group of people they suspect are after them:

They crawled slowly through the leaves toward what looked like lower ground. He lay listening, holding the boy. He could hear them in the road talking. Voice of a woman. They he heard them in the dry leaves. He took the boy's hand and pushed the revolved into it. Take it, he whispered. Take it. The boy was terrified. He put his arm around him and held him. His body so thin. Don't be afraid, he said. If they find you you are going to have to do it. Do you understand? Shh. No crying. Do you hear me? You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point it up. Do it quick and hard. Do you understand? Stop crying. Do you understand?

I think so.

No. Do you understand.

Yes.

Say yes I do Papa.

Yes I do Papa.

He looked down at him. All he saw was terror. He took the gun from him. No you dont, he said.

I don't know what to do, Papa. I don't know what to do. Where will you be?

It's okay.

I don't know what to od.

Shh. I'm right here. I won't leave you.

You promise.

Yes, I promise. I was going to run. To try and lead them away. But I can't leave you.

Papa?

Shh. Stay down.

I'm so scared.

Shh.

You’ll notice the lack of “standard” punctuation, and of course the lack of character names will also take some acclimation. Don’t sweat it, it works wonderfully.

If I have a complaint, it might be the flashbacks to the man’s wife (long since dead from a suicide), which though relevant to the storyline, seem tonally inconsistent with the rest of the book. It’s a minor quibble, but without it, this book might have gotten my first 10/10 rating. (I know, you were holding your breath…)

It’s a phenomenal work of a master in his prime. Yes, Oprah recommended this book, and yes, it won the Pulitzer Prize. All of that is well worthwhile, but – in sync with the storyline – I think my father’s words are what stuck with me, page after page.

When my father lent me his copy of this book, I asked him a simple question, “So…you think I should read this, then?”

His response: “Everyone should.”

Rating: 9.5/10.0