Sherry Chandler » Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy
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.
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8 Comments
1. Charlie H replies at 12th April 2007, 8:03 am :
I’m glad I read THE ROAD before Oprah picked it. That would probably have been enough to make me avoid it. But I’m glad she did. Now people will read it who might not have otherwise. It’s a book that deserves attention. Thought provoking, disturbing, and wonderful I thought.
2. Tommy replies at 12th April 2007, 9:24 am :
The woman may very well have feared capture, rape and degradation for herself and her son, but those never come to pass. Is that because the father can only protect one of them? Would her physical presence have been a burden? I guess I’d have to read the book if I wanted to answer those questions.
There aren’t many women in Blood Meridian, either. The kid falls in with a posse of men assembled to collect a bounty on the scalps of Indians and Mexicans. There isn’t a lot of the female impulse in their motives, which seem to me to be mainly violence. The money and the weapons are just means to that end.
3. poppysmatus replies at 12th April 2007, 10:37 am :
Insofar as ithis is a post-Twin Towers attack novel I read it as a plea for moderation in response to savagery. At one point a thief steals the heoes’ cart and supplies. After the father catches up to him and reclaims their property he makes the thief strip off all of his clothes and go naked into the wilderness. The boy persuades his father to relent and they leave the thief’s clothes in a pile. The old cliche about civilization only being 2 or 3 meals away from complete savagery is tested here and found too simplistic.
I just finished “The Buried Book” about the epic of Gilgamesh. G. returns home to his city at the end without immortality or even the plant of rejuvenation, and his beloved Enkidu is long dead. His only consolation is the structure of his city–a site now long buried and even now crushed into smaller bits by our Willingly Coalitioned tanks. But G’s epic has been rediscovered and remains. So maybe Story IS the basis of civilization.
4. sherry replies at 13th April 2007, 10:20 am :
Charlie H & Poppysmatus, thanks for counterbalancing my negatives with your positives. I agree with both of you that The Road is a book well worth reading. And it treated its main characters more gently than I had expected. Brings to mind the words “and a little child shall lead them.”
But I also continue to hold my reservations.
Poppysmatus, I address the ending of Gilgamesh here.
5. sherry replies at 13th April 2007, 10:23 am :
Tommy, I’ve seen Blood Meridian cited as both a more violent and a better novel than The Road. I think you will have to read the latter and I will have to read the former. Then we can have a conversation.
6. L A Coutant replies at 2nd May 2007, 10:36 am :
Just a few points. The mother is blind at the point of announcing her suicide to the father (probably from the toxins in the post-nuclear-et-al world they stumble through). She does *not* use one of the three bullets (there are only two at the time of her suicide). Instead she intends to use “obsidian” (steel-hard stone), probably to slit her wrists.
I am a long-time reader of McCarthy, but his early work is often very demanding (he uses almost half Spanish in The Crossing, per ex, with no easy translations made available, he often references biblical and other literary influences with highly poetic/philosphic prose, etc). Do your contributors think that, after reading The Road, they might try the earlier work? Do you think the “simplified” version of McCarthy in The Road (some have called the last two novels “McCarthy lite”) is aimed at reaching a larger audience? If yes, why? What is the message or intent of the prose’s momentum?
To be sure, many human beings have lived (and are living) lives not unlike those of the man and his son–ancient history recounts thousands of similar situations, contemporary refugees in Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East, etc are all living on the bare bones of existence, forced to confront the darkness of human life on a daily basis. Many have had the same debates about self-destruction as are referenced in The Road between the man and woman. Remember Paul and his wife in Hotel Ruwanda. So these difficult questions are being faced by many human beings in the larger world, the world that exists outside of America’s rather insular, self-indulgent sphere. Does this novel have the effect of making readers who are new to McCarthy’s work more aware of that “other” kind of life? If not, fine. If yes, what possible outcome might the novelist wish?
7. sherry replies at 2nd May 2007, 1:47 pm :
I stand corrected, L. A. Coutant, about the bullets and I apologize for mis-stating the facts. I’m usually a more careful reader than that (I think). My mind did wander when I read this novel. No doubt that indicates my essential frivolity. What can I say? Except that I stand by my assessment that the feminine aspect of this trilogy is done away with rather quickly, leaving us with a holy ghost.
8. Sherry Chandler » T&hellip replies at 19th May 2007, 7:20 am :
[...] I get back to my question of the feminine. I suppose one could argue that when you’ve killed the earth, you’ve killed the feminine aspect of God. And perhaps the whole novel is about what happens when the Mother dies. [...]
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