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It's a few days since I finished The Road. It took me a couple of weeks to read, because I found it harrowing; it had to stop being a bedside book after two separate sleepless nights. It's stayed with me, it's haunted me, and it's made me think. But I'm not sure it's quite the classic it was trumpeted as. The Long Walk, to perpetuate the King-McCarthy comparison from earlier in the thread (and this is a genre novel, and it is a horror novel) stayed with me, and that's essentially a piece of trash, a Ray Bradbury story absurdly stretched out, not a literary classic.
First the prose. I've read somewhere that McCarthy is incapable of writing a bad sentence. I submit these: He left the boy standing in the road holding the pistol while he climbed an old set of limestone steps and walked down the porch of the farmhouse shading his eyes and peering in the windows. He let himself in through the kitchen. Not bad sentences per se, but certainly uninteresting sentences. Genre sentences, the kind used to move the action along. And why that limestone in there? McCarthy does a lot of this naming of the parts. Were they limestone steps? Is that important?
Dusto on Blood Meridian: There are some moments where he chooses the perfect image and presents it in a precise poetic way. But other times, it feels a little lazy to me. Lots of flat description of traveling (oh, this time they're passing a group of dwarf cedars, last time it was acacias, before that scrub oaks, how interesting.)
The genius of McCarthy's prose, and I admit it works superbly, is in accretion of effect. Words laid on each other like building a wall, the finishing sentence of perfect poetic imagery that justifies the paragraph, the page, the effort. But there's an awful lot of plodding in there, and that needless accuracy instead of description. Alan Warner, reviewing the book in the Guardian, identified McCarthy as coming from the tough-guy tradition of American literature, and I think that's right. It's too long since I've read Hemingway to make the comparison. What we're presented with here is Western, cowboy prose; a mask, and when the mask slips there's emotion but we're waiting for flashes rather than getting it straight.
matthew: I think he's romanticizing the myths as well as making them ridiculous in the face of such horror, misanthropy and nihilism.
The Road is a post-apocalypse story. It's the answer to a sci-fi question; what if the biosphere died? It even contains some of the more lurid elements of genre, like the cannibals and the roadagents; Mad Max II territory. But McCarthy avoids the trappings of all that. He doesn't romanticise the empty Earth or use it as a canvas for a new civilisation of leather-wearing psychos. The emphasis is on dwindling resources and unending misery. A line I came across in an embarrassingly dated Martin Amis essay on nuclear war: When you stagger out of your shelter following the all clear, the only thing worth doing would be to stagger back in again. Everything good would be gone.
It sent me back to a line of Primo Levi's in If This Be A Man about how easy it is to create the conditions that bring humanity to perfect, utter misery and cause people to forget who they are or why they should be alive. All you have to do is take things away. (I can't locate the book to quote.) Take away shelter, clothing, warmth, food and the work does itself. That for me was the point of this book. It explored life when life becomes all but impossible. There was no hope in it and there was no future. At first you admire the protagonist for his skills of survival, like you do the survivors of Auschwitz and the other camps. The ones who have the presence of mind, the fortitude, the will and the strength to survive; they're the ones who got it right. They're the dudes, and here we're back to the romanticisation of a certain strain of masculinity and the cowboy myth again. What I liked was that against such a grim backdrop, the futility of the protagonist's survival becomes plain. Why survive? To survive? Why go down the road? You'll die if you do or if you don't. You survive through luck, not from being a flinty-eyed resourceful hero. And luck isn't necessarily good luck if it means you survive, because surviving isn't good news. The only fate worth avoiding is a fate worse than death. Death itself, compared to life, is kind.
That was the triumph of the book, for me. This landscape beyond hope, where living is just what the living do. There wasn't going to be a fertile valley from Z For Zachariah where survivors or traces of civilisation still lingered. When they reached the coast and it too was dead, it was clear that this book was uncompromising in its vision. That it was committed to grimness to the bitter, bitter end.
Then, seven pages from the end, McCarthy changes his mind. There is hope after all. A good person turns up who does what no good person would and invites another mouth to feed into his family. The protagonist's journey is proven worthwhile. He didn't die for nothing, apparently. The plain fact that this world is not survivable, that even if the new bunch of travellers enjoy the miraculous good luck that the boy and his father did and have the same skills and judgement they probably still won't last another year, is ignored. We're given a happy ending that just doesn't work, that goes against everything we've seen so far, a party hat on a corpse.
Boboss: It seems to me that if The Road is about anything, it's about love. The assertion that at the end of the world the only thing that holds out any possibility for a present and a future that contains hope, happiness, even meaning is love. Love and it's attendant virtue, trust.
What will survive of us is love. It fucking won't though, will it? What survived of anyone else in The Road was a dead body and maybe a few canned goods. Was it love that kept the man and the boy alive, or was it just the innate desire of life to keep living? Love gave them something, it's true, made something more of the dead world than was otherwise there, but I didn't see any hope offered for love. Love offered no more future than hate or solitude or preying on your fellow man. Where was the hope in this book, except in the ending that ignored everything that went before? |
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