"The Road"

Before anything else, I bring you something to do when you're actually supposed to be doing something far less silly and more productive. Onto the post! (Oh...I guess you could also procrastinate on work by reading that.)

I just finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Two thoughts:

1. I need a hug.
2. I'm...very confused. And if I read the whole thing over, I'd still be confused. If I read it over again with Mr. McCarthy sitting right there and explaining it to me, I'd probably still be very confused.

It's depressing, just as you'd expect. McCarthy is never precisely a ray of sunshine, and The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic world where it rains ash, the ash cloud has blocked out the sun for years, and almost everyone has gone crazy and is now cannibalistic. Oh...and the main character is slowly dying of some radiation/TB-like disease. Which will leave his son, the other protagonist, somewhat SOL.

Even the prose is depressing. McCarthy writes of a society where all the trappings that once defined a person (family, house, community, friends) are gone. He then removes everything else.

Neither of the protagonists has a name anymore. "The man" and "the boy" have lost so much that they have even discarded their names. They're now defined almost exclusively by their relationship to one another, since that's what's keeping them both going, as well as the only thing that really sets them apart from everyone else on the road. The only names in the book, as such, are when the child calls the man "Papa" and the man constantly thinks of the child as "son." This makes them unusual, since everyone else in the book is out to screw the rest of humanity. The groups that form are mini-armies verging on cults, where all the members are determined to cause as much pain as possible. They even kill their own (including, in one horrific scene, roasting a baby.) The man and his son are the only ones who band together out of a desire to be with someone they love and protect them. Hence, even though they can't remember their names, they still cling to the titles of father and son. (It's just my theory, but it makes sense to me.)

I got rather hung up on the language. McCarthy usually has somewhat sparse prose, but this is positively minimalist. No proper names, very simple sentences, and even limited punctuation. It's not consistent, but things like apostraphes phase in and out of the word. Don't, in one chapter, is dont in the next. Then the apostraphe will reappear. After noticing that, I started making notes on language and grammar as trappings of civilization. (Yeah, yeah, I can hear you laughing.) However, that's too geeky to bother you with.

The other BIG THING in the book is the narrator. I'm still at a loss on this one. The Road is 3rd person limited, focusing on the father. But every now and then, the narrator flipflops into 1st person, remembering the event rather than narrating it. SPOILER: This can't be the dad. He dies at the end. And he's firmly convinced that there's no afterlife, so remembering the whole trip seems right out. In addition, the 1st person sections sometimes turn into 1st person omniscient. God mode, anyone? I wondered if the whole book might be religious allegory, since you've got the protective but fairly hardcore/strict father and the very compassionate, physically fragile son.

The religious allegory thought kept bubbling up. Even if it's not the standard God/father, Christ/son metaphor, what about God/father and humanity/son? People with faith often describe it as a protective force that helps them through hard times, and the father is the only thing that keeps the son alive for most of the book. Even after his death, the father tells the son that he'll still be there for him. Most intriguing of all, the boy winds up with a good pair of people right after (divinde providence?) and the lady keeps trying to get him into religion. Buuuut...when the boy talks to God, he hears nothing. In order to get results, he talks to his dad.

Hmm, says I. I don't think it's perfect allegory, but it would not surprise me if MsCarthy was going for something along those lines.

Even though the book was pretty universally a downer, the ending is...not cheerful, but far better than I expected. Moral of the story: Most of humanity sucks, and most of us will get infinitely worse when confronted with bad situations, but there are some good people out there. But you probably won't meet them because they're hiding from you.

Now, on to something less cataclysmic and apocalyptic: Paradise Lost. D'oh...