Just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, first released back in September of 2006. One hell of a book, I must say. It's one of those stories that packs such a hidden wallop on your emotions and senses, you're left almost blindsided with self-directed questions, soul searching, passion for living. Humanity is veered at with a strong sense of duality; the darkest sides of man make you cringe and want to go postal, yet the beauty of true love and bonds give you hope. It's heavy stuff, I tell you.
The aftermath of an unspoken, unknown, mysterious global apocalypse. Buildings are charred, burnt to the ground or abandoned or half-sustained. Mother Nature cries gray tears, dusty gray snowfall and freezing-cold raindrops. The streets look like dust-filled corners of bedrooms. Corpses, mostly decomposed to extreme degrees, clutter the scenery. The lucky few who have survived have been left as shells of humanity---scruffy, scarred, unhealthy, clad in whatever garments they can scrounge up from the corpses they pass. No electricity to keep them warm. Just whatever fires they can muster up outdoors. The majority of those still living have devolved into the most savage degree of man, resorting to cannibalism to maintain breathing and killing whomever crosses their path out of a sort-of self-imposed survival necessity.
But "the man" and his son, "the boy," are two of the 'good guys.' Heading in an uncertain direction that they hope is South, they're hoping to make it to the sea, where they can ideally make an escape from the cruel world they're clinging to reluctantly. All they have is each other. All they need is each other. The boy, optimistic and innocent, yet maturing at a rapid pace. His one and only, his father, is a tortured soul, haunted by dreams of his loving wife who gave up on living and abandonded her family, constantly considering suicide yet harboring such urges at the sight of his dear offspring. If he dies, who'll look after the boy? He'd rather the boy die alongside him, so they can both enter the better place together. But, of course, he can't kill his own flesh and blood.
[I wrote that, btw. I didn't copy and paste from the book cover. I just wanted it to exist understandably as my own synopsis]
There's so much that I'm admiring about this book. It's one of those works of literature that makes a writer, or somebody who even fancies his or herself as one, immediately want to step his or her game up. Drastically. You think, could I ever create such an amazing piece of work, written with such clarity and such a distinct tone and secular vision? It's a National Bestseller and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, so please believe, I'm not merely blowing smoke here.
McCarthy employs so many unique touches here. Two particularly ring brilliantly for me: 1) Providing no actual names for any of the characters, for instance. In the post-apocalyptic world he's created, mankind is a mere fragment of what it once was, and nobody is special. Nobody is doing better than any others, alas nobody deserves any special distinction. 2) Never breaking the story up into chapters is another. It moves swiftly and urgently, yet is only divided into nut graphs, extended line breaks. It's a reader's equivalent to two love-driven survivors traveling across a barren wasteland with no clear path. They're just moving forward, just as the reader is here.
McCarthy's use of language is also something to behold. Example, explaining the bond between the father and son:
"....each the other's world entire."
The emptiness of their world:
"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and dull despair. The world shrinking down about 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 referants and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."
Questioning his existence after killing a man to protect his son:
"This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job."
Those are just examples I'm especially liking at this present moment. There's endless amounts of others. I could say so much more about this book, but I'll leave up to others to seek it out and read it for themselves. There's a movie adaptation coming out in mid-November, starring the great Viggo Mortensen. I doubt it'll better this book, but I have high hopes for it to at least do this work extreme justice. If not, at least the book is here to save itself.
We all travel down our own personal roads. After reading this, I'm fully realizing just how important it is to not take your life journey solo. You'll never make it out alive in the end.
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