McCarthy, Cormac: The Road
The Road
Writer: Cormac McCarthy
Genre: Fiction/Science Fiction
Pages: 287
I had my eye on this book before it won the Pulitzer, before it became an Oprah Book Club pick. In fact, I'm a bit glad Oprah picked it out, as it saved me the expense of having to buy it in hardcover when emerald_ibis selected it as our July/August challenge, and lucky me, that Oprah sticker peeled right off.
It's actually hard to articulate just what I think about this book. I'm a fan of the "literary SF" movement, and have no trouble whatsoever with "literary" writers appropriating overused conventions of the genre, because more often than not, I can really get into the character study that results. I adored Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, and enjoyed the hell out of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, despite its flaws. So I certainly expected to enjoy this.
Does this title just evoke Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again," or is it just me? No, it's a serious question! Especially since the phrase "the road again" pops up in more than one occasion. :)
Okay, in all seriousness. This book is SF only in setting. Post-apocalyptic, a nuclear winter. People keep calling this book a vision of the future, and if you check out the Wikipedia entry, it seems that's what McCarthy intended as well. Only I don't believe them.
There's something about the South that's kind of timeless. Sometimes, the deeper in the South you get, the more old-fashioned/backwards kind of communities you'll find. Technological advancements mean little to nothing. So in that sense, and coupling that with the whole nuclear winter aspect of this sucker, it kind of makes sense that we don't see any references to modern ways of living, and by modern, I mean broken cell phones, computers, the possible use of the internet to make connections with people.
Granted, in a nuclear winter, none of that shit's going to matter, but from a modern point of view, it should be on one's mind if one's trying to survive, if one's trying to find more "good guys." Particularly if there's any effort whatsoever to rebuild civilization from nothing.
But we don't see any of that. In fact, I started reading this as an alternate history, as what the world WOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE had the Cold War erupted after WWII. Maybe my brain's still kind of stuck in Kathleen Ann Goonan's alternate history In War Times, but still, I think you could make a case for it. I really do.
This book is a mix of ingredients: it's SF, it's horror, it's mainstream, it's literary. I was dismayed to learn that McCarthy employs that oh-so-annoying technique of no quotation marks (one of my beefs with Cold Mountain), and he seems to have random rules for which contractions require an apostrophe and which don't. And while I know that the South has its own way of speech patterns and logic--of which I truly appreciate--there were several instances I heard my mentor's voice in my head screaming, "NOT ENGLISH!!!" Cause let's face it, for all the description, there's just some sentences that don't make sense no matter how you read them.
Something I've noticed among literary writers, and that's the almost crippling use of passive voice and long, rambling sentences connected by any means necessary or none at all. I really, really wanted a red pen for this book.
That said, it was a surprisingly fast read, and it didn't even have any chapters. No, instead we'd get little scenes, some a paragraph long, some a couple of pages, broken up with a chunk of white space or asterisks. I'm honestly surprised how quickly I flew through this, because I did have problems with the prose, which I didn't find particularly beautiful at all. And while I'm picking on it, the random shifts to first/second person were jarring, and sometimes, I found myself thinking I was in the boy's head but I was never really sure.
Oh yes, the lack of names. Yeah, yeah, I get it. It's EVERYMAN AND HIS SON making this painstaking journey through a wasteland. EVERY READER is meant to identify with these nameless people, meant to take the walk in their shoes. Too bad that leaves EVERYWOMAN AND HER DAUGHTER out to dry, though I don't think McCarthy meant anything by it. Though one could make an interesting study focusing on the few women in this book: the mother, who couldn't take it, gave into fear, and committed suicide, which is the most notable case, but not the only one, and certainly not the most disturbing.
There's nothing in this book that shocked me, that horrified me. I was slightly chilled at the baby-barbecue scene, but let's be real: to any reader or viewer of post-apocalyptic fiction, there's just nothing here that stands out. And the characters simply didn't pull the weight. Unless you fell into the trap of EVERYMAN (and that'd be a very tempting trap if you have a child), it's just difficult to really get inside this man's head. Oh, it's admirable he doesn't give in, that he keeps going, that he keeps his son going. I enjoyed the fact that I knew someone would die in the end (someone had to) and later, when it became obvious it'd be the father, that essentially this whole journey was about preparing the son to keep going. But the end itself is a deus ex machina, a happily ever after that simply isn't deserved for so many reasons. Oh, the sentimental among us are happy that the boy's found the good people, that he's going to be okay, but frankly, I thought a more compelling drama would've been the boy deciding what to do with his father. I knew he'd never resort to cannibalism, but yet, the possibility was appealing, as was the possible symbolism.
To be honest, I feel like this should have been the boy's story. A character who knew of a world no different that this wasteland in which he trudged, a character who had no memories associated to any place, and the absolute fear of these ghosts that still linger in the land, the awe and discomfort of the tales of a land that used to be but never will be again. I think that's the story I would've preferred to read.
But I liked it enough. Didn't love it, didn't even like it a lot, but I didn't hate it either. I can see why it won the Pulitzer, see why it got Oprah's attention, and clearly understand why it didn't get a Hugo nod like some other online reviewers were clamoring for. Of the literary books that embrace the SF genre, Time Traveler's Wife is still a diamond as far as I'm concerned. The Road is okay, and certainly easy to recommend to those with no expectations for what post-apocalyptic fiction is, was, and could be. A book I'd definitely recommend to the literary reader, and only to the SF reader who doesn't expect the book to be SF. :)
EDIT: For an interesting discussion concerning the use of grammar and McCarthy's use (or lack there of), please read the comments to this entry here.
Next up: Coyote Frontier by Allen Steele