Review of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" as a failure of imagination
Synopsis:
The Road is a long, slow and depressing justification for simple-mindedness, especially as applied to morality.
Full text under the cut:
Picture the environmental devastation that is the Alberta Tar Sands.
Now picture Vancouver in Winter.
Now picture the tar sands, if they were located in Vancouver in Winter... but this extended to all times and all places.
You have now got gist of The Road, a SCIENCE FICTION novel by Cormac McCarthy, recently made into a movie.
When "Literature" writers take a crack at science fiction, they often do three things:
- Rehash sci-fi tropes born out of overworked plots
- Commit common mistakes in writing science-fiction
- Claim that their science-fiction novel is not science-fiction because it is much better than science-fiction
The Road is this sort of novel. I'm not sure if Mr McCarthy believes that his science-fiction novel is science-fiction or not, but reviewers seem to think it's not because he's a literary authour and so even his feces are works of AAAAARRRRRRTTTTT. And science fiction isn't art.
What tropes? What errors?
1. Generic Disaster:
Exactly what caused the disaster is unclear to the reader, and probably the characters in The Road as well. A few flashes and several heavy thumps heralded the event. Then the power cut out. Now the sky is heavily overcast to the point that noon looks like twilight. It's cold all the time. No plants grow.
Giant fires scorch cities and burn down forests. There's ash everywhere. I suppose this makes sense: dead trees burn. Abandoned houses burn, especially when the ones that aren't abandoned contain cooking fires. But there's something hot enough to melt people into asphalt... without burning the bodies much. Can't say what.
After ten years, pretty much any standing building is leaky and mouldy. And earthquakes. Sure, yeah. Those are scary. I dunno what would cause them, but they're around too.
And now a handful of survivors struggle to find canned food. And some of them hunt, rape and eat each other in ways that might make you feel look to regular old murder and cannibalism with nostalgia.
What caused it? I can see no possible culprits:
Nuclear war burns things, and EMP could knock the power out. But nuclear winter doesn't last a decade. And, hypothetically speaking, if the radiation was intense enough to kill off all edible plants and fungi, it would kill off humans too. Or cause earthquakes.
Massive vulcanism causes toxic ash to rain down, killing plant life and sterilizing the seas. And it could have something to do with earthquakes. But it releases carbon dioxide, which warms things up. And it doesn't knock the power out.
A solar flare could knock out power and burn things, but it wouldn't ignite a road here and there yet leave the rest of the region untouched. And it wouldn't cause earthquakes.
Engineered microbes/nanities could causes widespread death of plants and fungi, but they wouldn't cause explosions in the sky, or flash-burnt ashphalt, and they wouldn't knock the power out. Again: no earthquakes.
Hmm....
If nothing grows, and there are widespread fires, wouldn't we run out of oxygen?
So maybe the world is kept alive by mould? You'd think that if a lack of sunlight killed off the trees, then mushrooms would be happy and you could maybe eat those. But they're gone too - all the protagonists can find are some long dried up and buried and barely edible. I don't know what could kill all mushrooms and all trees, And yet pretty much every structure in The Road is dilapedated, water sodden and moldy? Wait. isn't mold a fungus? So this disaster only kills off fungus that we can eat?
So it's a "generic disaster" then.
There are some science fiction dystopias where things just go to shit. And these are usually bad novels. There are earthquakes and floods and famines and fires and so on. Each problem has to be compounded; each threat has to be topped. But this isn't speculative fiction so much a rehash of Revelations. A speculative apocalypse is one where the cause and effect make sense. Like CO2 and global warming. Or nuclear war. Or being hit by a comet. Or genetically engineered plague. Or the loss of farmable land. But in Revelations, God just starts beating on us for unclear reasons. And so it is in The Road.
2. Socioeconomic Inconsistencies
People are held as food animals in cellars, with one unlucky victim getting zer legs cut off and cauterized for zer owners to eat. But this doesn't make any sense. We treat cattle horribly, but we don't lock them up without food, then pick one for amputation, thus allowing our food to get slowly thinner and sicker. No. we kill them all at once and freeze or otherwise preserve them. But this doesnt' happen in The Road.
Everyone is starving, yet women are pregnant with babies, which are a source of food. Some may be held as slaves. Some may be resigned to eating their own babies as a survival strategy. There are two logical problems with this. First: it's hard to get pregnant when you're starving. It's possible, but difficult. Second: it's working against the second low of thermodynamics - making a baby takes more energy than you get from eating the baby. If you don't believe me, try it yourself. (Please disregard the last sentence - I have been advised that this may be illegal in some areas.) But why?
Why? If the bad guys just killed grown people and ate them, they wouldn't be quite as bad. Ordinary murder-cannibalism isn't sufficient. This has to be super cannibalism with babies gestated for food, captivity and amputation.
But why is that?
3. Tailoring a convoluted scenario to strongarm a conclusion to a moral quandry
Since SF is all about imagining worlds, it's a good place for this kind of writing-failure.
Example: In Sawyer's Calculating God, the atheist protagonist comes around to accepting intelligent design after talking to aliens who know that God exists and has a plan, then and asking a lot of deep questions of himself.
Okay. That's not entirely true. The aliens have a large amount of evidence to prove that god exists (and is a sociopath, but this gets overlooked) and then the narrator is convinced.
Okay. Still not true. But then God shows up and saves the Earth from a supernova. And then he's pretty much sold on intelligent design.
It's a common failing, and it is found in The Road.
It's not enough that we're desperately short on food, we have to be out. And it's not enough that plants have die, mushrooms have to die too - unless they're mold, in which case they are a thriving part of the general atmosphere of DOOM.
It's not enough that society has turned to murder, slavery and cannibalism. It has to be unusually nasty murder and cannibalism with baby-eating and amputations.
What is the moral conclusion? Something about human goodness and compassion under pressure, with some sort of biblical current underneath. Something about the intrinsic innocence of children. Something using repeated references to "...carrying the fire..." of civilization in the face of something beyond a Hobbesian sate of nature. Something which repeatedly breaks the world down into "...good guys..." and "...bad guys...."
I
4. Failing Bechdel's Feminist Movie Test on a Variety of Levels
There aren't a lot of characters with dialogue in this book. It's mostly father and son mumbling the same few lines of dialogue to each-other, but there are a lot of other people, observed silently from a distance. And it seems that, here, women constitute ourselves only in relation to males. There's the protagonist's wife and mother of his son who commits suicide rather than face her and her son's starvation and rape. There's some woman who gets left behind by a gang who tries to ambush the protagonist, who he chats to briefly and without fear because she is somehow not a threat in herself. And then there's an adoptive mother at the end, but she doesn't really say much. And there are women towed on a cart as chattel or baby-machines, women kept in a cellar, and one woman who gives birth so that her friends can roast it.
Apparently, women aren't able to either forage for ourselves or hunt other human beings for food. Nope. We're around to make babies, take care of kids, and get raped.
When I read this, I kept thinking of the former women's co-op (now functioning more healthily as a feminist co-op, which is the sortof change that happens when a member has a son) with their own hydroelectric system up the road from me, and how they'd fare in a freezing apocalypse. And then I realize that they are mired under impassable snow for about half the year, and seem to manage.
Conclusion: A long, slow descent into moral simplicity
The gist I got from reviews is that the unexplained disaster was a plus.Like McCarthy was being clever. I disagree: this is just apocalyptic anxieties tossed forth onto a page, and left unexamined. It's like how people talk about the horrors of nuclear fallout, or the Mayan Calendar, or the ozone layer without knowing how it actually works or would work, or how or if we should adjust our behaviour in light of it. Doing this is understandable. We often talk about things without knowing how they work. But it's not wise. And if you're going to write a book on a topic, then you really should ground it in experience and/or research.
You could write about a Revelations-style ultra-apocalypse and do it well. The key would be to examine the mythology, and its roots in unconscious anxieties. Why are we scared more by impossible/uncontrollable events than by the real consequences of our own actions, be they actions that cause a disaster, actions that (fail to) prepare for a disaster, or our actions in responding to it?
It could be because, as in Revelations and The Road, imaginary harm can always trump a real one - ask yourself which is worse: Hitler, or Hitler and Darth Vader working together with an army of zombie velociraptors*?
Is this what underlies the end-scenarios of fear-based monotheism? Hell and the apocalypse? Dying slowly and painfully is bad, perhaps bad enough that you might want to extend your imagination and agency into the realm of making contigency plans for euthanasia, but hell is worse. Globalized militarism and environmental irresponsibility could have terrible consequences unless we extend our imagination and agency into constructing a different way of living, but compared to the immanent arrival of what is foretold in revelations, it's really not that important.
The fear of hell and the eschaton are deliberately nebulous things, used by irresponsible leaders to stifle the imagination. Why not write about that? Examine it. Take it apart, look at the pieces, then build something better.
As The Road stands, it makes a virtue of the failure of imagination. At no point does anyone try to change the status quo. The closest thing to that is suicide. No one asks whether we can get that hydroelectric dam running again, and see if we can't grow some plants indoors. No one asks if we ever can grow food again, and if we can't, is suicide (or even cannibalism**) actually worse? And nowhere is there a serious discussion about why we fear apocalypses that would be inescable were they not impossible.
I think of a bad episode of South Park. Parker and Stone produce a handful of cutting insights every season. But often their satire is just rehashing centrist notions of politically apathetic common sense (i.e. Stan's monologues) and adding a punchline at the end.
The Road takes a boogeyman born out of ignorance and fear, makes it sound real, then glorifies responding to it without imagination or agency. It's not interested in alternatives: starving people descend into barbarism where women and children are raped and everyone is eaten and the handful of "..good guys..." are distinguished by abstaining from cannibalism while caring for children and slowly starving to death (rather than trying to fix things). That's just how humans work. Strip away the luxuries and that's what we are.
If science-fiction is about speculation, with roots in creativity, imagination, and critical thought, then maybe The Road is not science fiction so much as a failure of science-fiction.
*not the real velociraptors, the big ones from the Jurassic Park movies
**ordinary cannibalism. Not the super-evil cannibalism as found here.