July / USA Reading: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

[Virgil]

Well, I read The Road after the group did and love it...

But...

did you know they're making a movie? I think they'll have to flesh it out some but, hmmm, Viggo Mortensen

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/

Yes. Can't wait for it to come out. You didn't vote in the poll Fifth.

[TheFifthElement]

Duly corrected Virgil

Joreads - yes, definitely agree

[AbbeFara]

I read The Road about a month back now, I have to say that whilst at first I was skeptical of the authors style, in that I felt it was rather manipulative, these thoughts were quickly dispelled - by the end of the book I was left utterly astounded. I cannot recall a book affecting me so powerfully; there were many passages of stunning brilliance and the intensity of the emotion that the author conveys, to me completely vindicates the usage of an almost snare-like style of stream-of-consciousness writing. What we have here is a first-rate example of the power of premise. Everyone who has read the book will understand what I mean - the lack of narrative depth, the size of the cast of characters; the sheer assaulting pace all serve to display that with a premise as shattering as The Road's, the author can explore themes and ideas with an emotion, an immediacy; an intensity that other perhaps more detailed approaches could never hope to manage.

McCarthy shows an admirable amount of trust for - or familiarity with his audience in that many of the most arresting moments of the novel for me occurred whilst my eye was away from the page; the number of times I sat back for a couple of minutes and just thought 'Jesus!' - reading on and ultimately leaving the passage with a deeper and more meaningful understanding of everything from the origins of religious feeling and the development of tribal/nepotistic tendencies in society, to the growth of many of the forms of domination and prejudice still relevant to us today. At the same time as providing a devastating account of a dystopian future, McCarthy allows us a unique, uncompromising look at our societies' past. In the world he offers us morality means nothing, or at least is speedily degrading as the author shows us, through the painful questions The Boy asks his beloved Father about the methods he uses to survive, and who he hurts in the process.

The implications this book presents are almost unbearably depressing - as is the knowledge that although never in such final and fatal circumstances, humanity has been here before and will inevitably be so again. On the brink of extinction and reduced to our most basic forms, who can question the employment of slaves, the subjugation of the ever-pregnant women or the cannibalism; when day after day the choice is between debasement and death. That the protagonists have so far avoided the methods employed by the more brutal of the characters we encounter, seems to me more down to luck than heroism; in their desperation they hang on to their memories - in clinging to their identity they manage to retain some semblance of morality. What in this broken world does it mean, to call someone brutal? The blurred moral compass and the shifting temporal focus of the books premise, are the ultimate justification for the writers fluid, flowing, relentless style. The lack of punctuation, proper nouns and other linguistic conventions plunge us headlong into the emotional storm that the themes and ideas presented by the novel provoke for us.

He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

As the book goes on it becomes more and more difficult to ascertain whether The Boy or The Man is talking; who is leading the conversation - who is posing the questions. We can only assume The Boy is growing whilst The Man is deteriorating; McCarthy approaches this theme with such skill, care and affection for his characters that it took my breath away. This is another good example of McCarthy's trusting, evocative style. He expects us to see these developments, appealing to our instincts and humanity rather than relying on traditional descriptive devices to offer the story to us on a silver platter - an approach which is employed masterfully at every level of the novel. Is it the changing relationship between the pair that confuses us or our slow realisation of the fact our normal social conventions and ways of operating just do not apply, or both? Does it matter who is speaking to whom, what their names are or what are their motives in this place? Our innate answers to these questions provide, I think, one of the only sources of hope in the whole book. We are human. Even in the midst of this tempest of a work; within the violence, desperation and animalism we search for understanding and meaning, as do the protagonists. The author touches us thus with an unbelievable agility; that for me is a sign of a master at work.

Similarly, it is difficult to tell where the characters' conversations, authors' narrative or internal thoughts of the protagonists begin and end; the shapeshifting narrative haunts the characters, sliding in and out of view - here comforting us with beautiful interactions between the father and his boy, there stunning us with the primal immediacy of their emotions (and those, of course, of the characters they meet). I remember clearly being blown away by the sequence from where the pair's trolley is stolen by another survivor, up to the boy's bitter interrogation of his father's reaction. McCarthy often dropped my jaw with awesome, wonderfully powerful metaphors; he left me so much food for thought with the thematic implications explored earlier, I felt totally involved in what I was reading - more so than any book I can remember. Truly a unique, cinematic experience. I was delighted when I found out that this book was being adapted to film - If No Country for Old Men is anything to go by, we shouldn't be disappointed.

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

I am getting goosebumps writing about it more than four weeks later. I hope someone reads this and can get what I did from the text, think about religion, think about domination in society and where it came from when you re-read the book. The author added a crippling humanity to these seemingly faceless, cruel and impersonal structures and transformed the way I view society, whilst taking me on an intimate, emotional thrill-ride. McCarthy reminded me that even the worst things in the world (self-deceptive religious feelings, brutal violence, fear of difference) have their roots in an intensely emotional, primal necessity; disarming, dejecting and enlightening me at a stroke. In four words, The Road is: fluid, haunting, evocative and meticulous. In one harrowing evening and night, this book changed many things about the way I see the world, and in this it is a work of sheer genius. I know this review may seem over long and out of step with the thread but this is the first time that I have been driven to write about a book this way (without being told to) and for this, Cormac McCarthy - I salute you!

You said you wouldnt ever leave me.

I know. I’m sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.

[sadparadise]

Fantastic, dark, bleak and prose that rolls off the tongue. One of my all time favorites!!