Travelling with Cormac McCarthy on The Road

The world has suffered a terrible calamity. Exactly what is never explicitly explained, but it is implied that apparently two countries with nuclear weapons finally decided to try them out and see what happened. The world is cold. The sun is blotted out from the sky. The plants are dying. The sky is gray and the surface of the Earth is covered by a constantly shifting gray ash. Within this world walks two human beings and they are a man and his son. This is very basic plotline of Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road."

McCarthy has garnered a lot of attention lately. His book "No Country for Old Men" was turned into a powerful and moving film that won a lot of shiny statues at last year's Academy Awards. He is known for his very bleak view of the world, and for describing horrors and atrocities with a frankness and bluntness that often leaves readers stunned. His novel "Blood Meridian" is so relentlessly violent that many have had to put the book down just to give their minds a rest from the carnage. However, both "Blood Meridican" and "The Road" are being turned into Hollywood productions even now as I write this.

McCarthy writes in short, direct sentences. He never used quotation marks and sometimes the words spoken by characters are not even separated from paragraphs that just describe the action. Reading his work is an active exercise and one that you have to brace yourself for. The most idyllic scene can suddenly turn horrific as the young man and his son turn one corner after another while trying to survive.

The two characters are headed south and they want to head for the coast. They really have no idea what they fill find there, but the man has told the boy that he thinks it might get warmer if they head south. Now, they only have to get there while dodging the bands of cannibalistic humans who roam the land since other food is in desperately short supply. The trees produce no more fruit and their leaves crumble to dust at a mere touch. No crops grow. Everything is coated with ash and it snows almost constantly. The sun never appears.

The man had a wife and she was pregnant with the boy when the event happened. Shortly after this, his wife committed suicide. He could barely muster up any arguments for her not to do this at the time. He carries with him a pistol, but that pistol has only two bullets in it. One is for him and the other... We realize at some point that the man has taught the boy how to shoot himself through the mouth so that he will die effectively and without pain. The man, meanwhile, wakes up morning after morning coughing up blood.

This is a relentlessly bleak book, but these characters are so compelling that the reader is propelled forward. One reviewer stated that you feel you have to keep reading this book in order for the characters to stay alive. There is that sense to it. It's like they are alive just to tell you their story. The man is cynical and knows how the world works and he is upset over the fact that the boy keeps running into people and wants to help them.

The book has no chapters. The sections are short, maybe a paragraph or two, at most a page and a half, like short stories and they push the plot forward. Flashbacks are thrown in throughout, but always there is the man and the boy, pushing forward with a shopping cart filled with provisions they are able to scrounge. They are the "good guys" and they will not eat other people.

They run across unimaginable horrors. There is a house with a basement room filled with people being slowly harvested for food, for example. Then there is what they find turning on a spit at an abandoned campsite that I dare not even try to describe here. The world is surviving just barely and people have been reduced to their most base instincts and below.

Despite the relentless gloom, cold and ash, there is a strange kind of hope within the character of the boy. He still believes that people are good. He believes people are worth helping. He believes that he and his father are "carrying the fire" and that there is still a reason to be civil. It is this small note of hope that ends the book, leaving the reader with sadness but a feeling that maybe, just maybe, beneath the ash and the snow there are seeds waiting to grow and that maybe, just maybe, beyond the endless crawling gray clouds, is a sun that might strike them and help them do just that.