With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here.

Cormac McCarthy’s latest book is not set in the American southwest nor is it a tale about the cowboy culture at all. ‘The Road’ takes place sometime in the near future, following some cataclysmic event that has destroyed a good portion of the U.S. and possibly the world, we don’t know. Whether by nuclear war or natural disaster is not told – just that a man and boy are on a journey down what is left of a road. The man and boy are father and son and are trying to get south to avoid the severe cold.

How and why they came to be traveling on this road is not disclosed either. Small flashes of memory from the father help to form a vague picture of what was before and what the circumstances were. The boy’s mother, his birth, a quiet domestic scene. The reader begins to get a sense of the suddenness of the disaster followed by a few years of widespread societal disintegration and mass death.

The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? She said. He didn’t answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass.

They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn. A few nights later she gave birth in their bed by the light of a drycell lamp.

When we first meet up with the man and his son, both of whom are nameless, they are already on the move across a destroyed land that contains no life. No birds are seen in the skies nor fish in the useless streams. There are people still left but they are to be avoided – nightmarish bands of wandering cannibal blood cults, for whom there has long ceased to be hope, seeking only the most primitive sort of survival. Then there are the corpses they encounter in doorways and on the streets – mummified and frozen in grotesque poses – captured in last acts, like a futuristic Pompeii.

The breakdown of society has been gradual enough to still yield the occasional caches of food that the man finds, but there is nothing to eat anywhere and it is a daily struggle to keep going in freezing temperatures and a world covered in ash.

McCarthy sketches a contrast between what was, through the father’s memories and this new world order, viewed by the boy who has no picture at all of a life before this. It is not unlike having a conversation with a grandparent about how things were – without photos, it is difficult to imagine their world. McCarthy has chosen an extreme construct in which to portray this passing down of memories. There is an especially moving scene, all the more-so in its ordinariness and inanity, and illustrates beautifully, in a few words, the boy’s lack of context and the father’s spark of hope.

They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on, they came upon a roadside gas station….The linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof. He crossed to the desk and stood there. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father’s house in that long ago. The boy watched him.
What are you doing? He said.

McCarthy deftly references the current urban situation as the man and his son travel with their belongings in a scavenged metal shopping cart, a preferred mode of storage and travel for society’s inner city homeless. He also hits cultural touchstones and symbols.

By the door were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with a pry bar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola.

What is it, Papa?

It’s a treat. For you.

What is it?

And as the two are trudging down the road, a reference to an old tourist attraction that fixes the place and time.

Tall clapboard houses. Machinerolled metal roofs. A log barn in a field with an advertisement in faded ten-foot letters across the roofslope. See Rock City.

It’s a dying world, the father and son slogging on in excruciating conditions – McCarthy frequently places his characters in extreme settings – deserts, mountains, in all sorts of brutal weather, without food, but this is his ultimate test of survival. The boy is the only reason the man keeps going. McCarthy’s women characters don’t usually feature very strongly and it is no different in, ‘The Road’. The mother, when confronted with the realization of the horrifying events undoubtedly in store for them (being raped, killed and eaten), has packed it in, committing suicide, leaving the man to care for their son alone.

This is really one of the main points of the book – a love story between the father and son. McCarthy has set these two down in a terrain of the worst possible conditions to see how they rise (or not) to the occasion and achieve a sort of redemption in a world so dead that there is nothing redeemable. McCarthy has father/son themes running through all of his work and there’s a wealth of academic material on this. Taken at face value, however, he has stripped away everything to focus entirely on their relationship and bond. Where the boy goes emotionally and philosophically is very deep and as the story progresses, the child indeed, becomes father to the man. As always, McCarthy’s prose are so exquisite that even post-apocalyptic conditions are rendered poetic, almost like Chinese poems or haiku. The father still dreams at night – dreams of the past and when he wakes to once more look around him, the contrast is sometimes wrenching.

In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy. Her nipples pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white. She wore a dress of gauze and her dark hair was carried up in combs of ivory, combs of shell. Her smile, her downturned eyes. In the morning it was snowing again. Beads of small gray ice strung along the lightwires overhead.

He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death. He slept little and he slept poorly. He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from such siren worlds. Lying awake in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.

In ‘The Road’, we see a new level of openness and intimacy from McCarthy. The father/son portrayal will rip your heart out and in the hands of a lesser writer, might be profoundly maudlin, but I feel that Cormac McCarthy is incapable of writing anything even close to that. He has not ever written a bad book, only good and better. ‘The Road’ is better.

Marc Goldin currently lives in Chicago, with three cats, each one more long-haired than the last. Interests have ranged from medieval monasticism to discontinued stations on the London Underground – literary likes too diverse (some would say schizo) to list here although the last several years have been witness to an intimacy with Scottish and Irish literature. American Southern and Beat era lit also account for some of the ‘missing years’. Music tastes run the gamut from Cuban Danzon to Ska (all three waves but having a specific attachment to the second, two-tone period) to the Tuvan throat singers. Has written book reviews for a now defunct Irish literature site and has several short stories in various stages of development. Mad for black and white photography and aspires to someday have a complete collection of photos documenting every close in the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh. Works in the IT dept. of a French company in the current political climate. In football, supports Chelsea, Hibs, and for the sake of employment security, Marseille. For more articles and reviews by Marc on The New Review, click here or to read Marc's story, 'Plastic Paddy' on the Showcase, click here