The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Read this book in one day and feel a bit let down. The material, like the burned world being described, is worn out and mostly dead. Been done before. Still the approach is fresh. The prose is well crafted and beautiful, even when describing despair and horror. But the lovely prose can be distracting. Entertaining, but intrusive. The characters, the man and his son, are nameless. Maybe to embody the everyman. Their character comes through strongly but without identity. The voice of author predominates. Who is supposed to be writing this?

Literature professors and literature majors often say, between the lines and never so bluntly, that popular fiction, or genre fiction, or pulp fiction is all plot and no substance. The only skill they attribute to the author is in telling a story for its entertainment value and the highest measure of their writing skill is to not intrude on the story. To be transparent. Real literature to them is about the writing. And ideas, themes, symbols. The magic of words. The plot is not important and the story can be as mundane as someone wandering around a city for a day and returning home. The authorial voice in these books is more important than the voice of the characters. The dont often acknowledge that the best fiction does both. The author speaks through the characters and the plot and the story and the words themselves but doesnt intrude too much. This author is loved by the critics and literarati but is far from transparent.

Everything in the world is burned. The world is grey. Wet ash, gray sky, smoke still, lots of rain. There is no date or explanation for the fire. It is up to the reader. Is this a manuscript left in a drawer that was started in the cold war times? The fire seems nuclear. But ambiguous. Maybe it is the biblical apocalypse of the world destroyed not by water but by fire. Maybe it just seems relevant now due to global warming but even lecturing ex-vicepresidents wouldnt imagine this extreme. All the ex-vicepresidents are dead here though. Everything is dead. No plants grow and the trees crumble to dust if not burned already. No bugs. No animals. When the canned goods ran out people turned to cannibalism.

Who is writing this book? There is no paper. Its all ash or sodden pulp. The man is teaching the boy to read and write as they go south. On the road. Running from winter and slowly starving. Or he was teaching him but as they starve and hide from other horrors the lessons have stopped. If the text is this distinctive surely the author is important. Its not the post literate voice of a surviving culture. Like on my namin day i kilt me a bar. This author uses a large and expressive vocabulary. And short choppy sentences. Fragments. All apostrophes must have been burned in the fires that scorched the world. There are also random wordcontractions. This may be another literary allusion as the man and boy go south to find the snotgreen scrotumtightening sea.

There are few proper names in the book. They are avoided here too. Only God and a man who said his name was Ely are properly named, but Ely said that he was lying and wouldnt tell them his real name.

Dialog is like this.
Are you talking now?
Yes.
Where are we going?
South.
Do you want to die?
Yes.

The road should be capitalized. But it isnt. It’s the everyroad. The road that goes ever on and on. The allroads that leads to that city across the sea that burned while the emperor fiddled and has presumably burned again. They have a roadmap but the names are useless now. They havent seen the sky for maybe eight or nine years. All nights are dark. Quiet. No birds, no animals. They hear rain and thunder. Sometimes trees fall. The road is that path to the sea and also the greatest danger, because they dont know who theyll meet on it.

Perhaps the fire should be capitalized, too. But there are two fire symbols in the book. The fire of destruction or purification that cauterized the world and the fire the man and boy carry. That is the fire to live and the fire of hope and the fire of determination. The ash from both fires is everywhere.

Reading the book in one day is fairly easy. At lunch they set off with their shopping cart. Freezing as they go south. At supper they are avoiding cannibals and finding roasted children on firespits. After a warm bath the man swims naked in the cold sea out to a shipwreck and fills his pockets with whatever he can find. Literary allusions abound. By bedtime there is sadness followed by a little hope and the end.

The book is currently a bookclub choice by a popular television hostess. The world in the book is past television and the boy wouldnt know her name. The man would but wouldnt speak it. Names are past as well. The wires are melted on the tarmac of the road and there wont be television anymore. Ever. The book is about human nature distilled and crystallized by horrible circumstances and about love and hope, but all of these postapocalyptic books are about the same thing. Even the bad ones. This one is very good, but perhaps not great.

The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on.

That was a quote. Its hard to tell since the quotation marks burned in the fire along with the apostrophes and birds. The book has a lot of that. Horror and beauty. Pretentious and versey.