The Road - A Novel by Cormac McCarthy: Review

Rating: 8/10

On reading the jacket blurb or synopses of the novel, one would get the impression that The Road is a sci-fi novel centered on the survival of a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic world, where everything is dead or dying save a few humans, some animals that were lucky enough to survive, and hardly anything in the plant world. At the outset of the novel and until a few pages into it, the reader feels this is what he is in for - a mere survival tale akin to the hundreds of others in the post-apocalyptic fiction genre. But very soon they realize it's not so much a story about the father-son survival as it is about the father-son relationship itself and the challenges of fatherhood and the sacrifices it demands.

Emotions run high and higher than tension in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in the near future where an unknown catastrophe - either gradual or sudden, it's difficult to say - has destroyed and burned civilization as we know it and has plunged mankind and indeed life itself to the brink of extinction. Everything is grey and ashy, and hopes of returning the planet back to its pre-apocalyptic state are as bleak as the cold wind that freezes the ground at night. The sun is blocked with the dark ashes that fill the sky, and the brightest light of day makes for only the faintest of vision. There is nothing left to eat except the sparse leftover canned food of yesteryears. Dry, rotting corpses are scattered everywhere. Cannibalism is a commonplace amongst the survivors, and humans, now back to their savage state, have become more skilled at hunting other humans than at hunting animals. And amid all this hellish mess, a man struggles to keep his son alive without losing their humanity in a world he believes god has abandoned a long time ago.

The moral dimensions of the novel, as opposed to McCarthy’s previous works such as No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian, are simple. Everyone is divided into “good guys” or “bad guys,” and actions too are either good or bad. Although some readers cribbed about this being an issue, to me it doesn’t contradict the motivations of characters as the world they are living now is more primitive than the early stone ages had witnessed, and morals in such a world are anything but complex. Throughout the bulk of the novel the author builds for his audience such a subtle and strong bond with the main characters that the readers don’t realize how much they have fallen in love with them till the very end. And let me be quick to admit, and I’m not alone in this, this is the first novel that evoked such an intense emotional response in me that my eyes literally misted up, if not wept, in the final few pages of the novel. The sparkle of love in the backdrop of this gloomy, unforgiving and dismal atmosphere glitters like the last piece of pearl in the abyss of a dead and long abandoned ocean – an ocean which plays a pivotal role in the story.

The road to the coast of the ocean is purported to be a metaphor by many readers – and it may well be if that is what the reader wishes to think of it – but McCarthy in a rare interview said the road is just a road for him, although he wouldn’t deny his readers the freedom of interpretation. His writing style often and intentionally violates many rules of English grammar, such as constructing only sentence fragments instead of complete sentences, omitting apostrophes at many places, avoiding quotation marks entirely, et cetera. But to balance the act, McCarthy is such a master at what he does that his writing gets borderline poetic even in prose (“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”) and expresses so many thoughts and emotions in so few a words (“I envy the dead; it’s over for them,”) that it’s easy to get lost in the images and the weight of meaning they bear, to the length that we forget it’s words we are looking at. There are a few horrifying scenes, certainly not for the squeamish to read, embedded in the story. Character development is at the core of his creative writing process, and plot too serves as a platform for pushing them to the boundaries of survival and sanity and testing their instincts, especially the man’s paternal instincts. Another oddly interesting thing I noticed was that while I’m a staunch atheist myself, I thoroughly embraced the metaphorical and elegiac use of the concept of “god.” And like in the author’s entire body of work, women play a small role even in this novel, with only two of them appearing and only for a few pages.

All things considered, The Road is a modern literary gem that is as haunting as it is beautiful, and, at 300-odd pages, is not as thick as it is rewarding. Cormac McCarthy has set a benchmark for future authors of this genre and the whole of fiction writing to use as a definitive guide of storytelling and created a world so engulfed in both affection and poignancy that it melts the hearts of even the coldest of readers. This is emotive art the likes of which literature hasn’t seen before, earning McCarthy, among other things, the honor of being one of the great American writers of our age.

Trivia: While I’ve come to dislike comparing books and films, which frankly is like comparing apples with oranges, the film adaptation was lacking one crucial element: the sense of time. The novel has it, and gives the feeling that the story is taking place over a long period of many years, which it is. But the film makes it seem like the story occurs over a two-day period, which is a shame because half the connection between the audience and characters is lost there, with the result being a woefully inept adaptation in terms of sentimentality. I won’t, however, take away from the director the stark imagery he has so skillfully crafted - an important aspect of creating the mood for the action to take place in.

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