Sherry Chandler

In the morning they came out of the ravine and took to the road again. He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.

— Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf 2006), p. 66

Spoiler warning:

After reading The Road, which he discovered before Oprah, my husband re-read The Odyssey, as, I suppose, the prototypical road novel. He told me he found The Odyssey more violent. As with Greek drama if not Greek poetry, most of the violence in The Road takes place off stage. The man and his son (of about ten) who are the nameless central characters trudge through their ashen world past mummified corpses, heads impaled on burned out trees, and, even once, a new-born human turning on a spit. But the would-be baby-eaters were frightened away by the approach of our heroes, and their other confrontations with humans-reverted-to-savagery are relatively mild and bloodless. We’re not dealing with a Conan story here. It’s not Quentin Tarrantino. The father constantly threatens to be savage in defense of his son, but always that son restrains him.

The Road is written in beautifully simple prose. Style is what keeps you reading this nearly 250-page story of an endless trudge across the eastern mountains to the sea. I think it may have been finding clever ways for the father to scavenge and scrounge that kept McCarthy writing. But that way lies blasphemy.

Whatever the apocalyptic tragedy, the man is mythically homeless, pushing his grocery cart of possessions along what’s left of the interstate highway system. There is, unfortunately, a tendency to toward sentence fragments that becomes almost a stylistic tic. It’s as though McCarthy avoided compound/complex sentences by breaking them up into their component parts. It got on my nerves a bit, but otherwise the prose is faultless.

The mother in this trinity, having stuck around long enough to give birth to and suckle the son (a familiar pattern), has opted out, using one of their three bullets to kill herself rather than face rape, slavery, and worse for herself and her son. This self-immolation creates, as my son pointed out to me this last Easter weekend, a holy ghost (and also relieves McCarthy of the burden of creating a believable woman).

The trinitiy symbolism is appropriate. We may be looking at an allegory here.

All through the book the reader is faced with the question: to what possible good end can this struggle lead? Why not use their last two precious bullets to do the deed for which they’re being horded.

But there is also the sense that this pair is somehow exceptional. The son has an extraordinary moral sense for a child, especially a child who has known only deprivation and savagery. His lessons are the stories his father tells him of the civilized world. They are the “good guys” (another phrase that grates a little in the current political climate); they “carry the fire.” (A redundant burden, perhaps, in a burnt and burning world.) Always they experience hair-breadth escapes. Starved and sick, they always find that last cache of canned goods. Wounded, they escape capture and the degradation it would bring.

Do they come to a good end? That would be telling. But keep in mind that Oprah chose this book and she is not much into hopelessness.

I find myself, in writing this mini-review, more negative than I’d realized. In part, I think it’s reaction to the lionizing of this novel. But also, I think it’s because there is little of the feminine principal here. On one level, it’s just another romance of the road, no women need apply.

When questioned about her dark outlook last week in Louisville, Louise Glück said something like this: If hope is to be found, it must be found after facing up to the worst. I think Mr. McCarthy may have flinched.

Lexington Climate Actions & Info-Fest
A day of ACTION AND INFORMATION
Saturday, April 14, 2007, 12 noon-2pm
Phoenix Park ..Corner of Main St and Limestone St (next to Main Public Library)

Join local citizens, farmers, activists, and children in a celebration of spring and upcoming Earth Day….. and connect with millions across the country in the National Day of Climate Action.

On April 14 the Lexington Farmers Market will return to its outdoor location onVine Street between Upper and Limestone beginning at 7:00 AM until sold out.

So come out and support your local farmers, and then celebrate Earth Day at Phoenix Park.

For other Step It Up events around Kentucky, check here.

See also this listing of Earth Days in the Bluegrass.