Closely following his violent but engrossing pot boiler, "No Country for Old Men", Cormac McCarthy has released a new novel that thrusts him in the forefront of great American novelists. "The Road" is quite simple, reminiscent of Beckett's "Waiting for Godot", only in prose. Instead of two tramps, an unnamed man and his young son travel down an ash covered road through an ash covered post nuclear holocaust, scavenging for food and avoiding roving bands of cannibalistic "bad people". The liner notes for the book describe it well:

"A father and his song walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls, it is gray."

Cormac McCarthy's style is sparse like Hemingway's, yet has that lyrical descriptive power that drives the brilliant Mexican border trilogy beginning with "All the Pretty Horses". He sets the tone for "The Road" early in the book:

"With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn't sure. He hadn't kept a calendar in years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here".

An element in "The Road" missing from "No Country for Old Men" is love, the same longing that made the journey of the two young boys in the border trilogy so compelling. The father, suffering from tuberculosis, will fiercely protect his son, and shoots a man who sees the boy as a sex object and food. We have seen the survival theme dramatised before, including a Fred Astaire film about a world devastated by nuclear war, but it is McCarthy's prose and sense of drama that keeps the story fresh and ultimately disturbing. "The Road" could have been a short story or novella, and at times seems a bit tedious, but that is the point. The reader suffers the difficult monotony of survival with the man and his young son as they search a barren landscape competing with roving predators capable of cooking a new born infant. They can never pause too long knowing even a campfire will attract thieves and killers. One of the father's final acts is to instruct his son how to kill himself with the last bullet.

Despite this grim theme, there is the promise of hope and the bond of love. The dying father tells the son, "You're going to be lucky. I know you are." He reminds him of another little boy who may or not be real: "Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again." Perhaps goodness will find the son, as well.

With "The Road", Cormac McCarthy has created a classic that expands his range as a novelist.

(Picador, ISBN 978-0-307-26543-2, pp241, €

---

Using the buttons below you can save this article to your favourite social bookmarking site