The withdrawal from Afghanistan generated a blitz of introspective posts last month. When the dust settled I found that I didn’t really have much to say for a bit. My usual process when that happens is to replace writing with reading and eventually the well gets filled. It’s pretty full up now. So it’s time to write again.
This will be the first of a few essays on recent books that I’ve read. There will be some light spoilers. I’m going to start with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
I don’t know much about McCarthy the man. I’ve read three of his novels. The Road is his tenth and latest. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. I haven’t seen the 2009 movie based on the book but I have listened, at length, to Nick Cave’s soundtrack. If you’re into Nick Cave you’ll like it quite a bit.
The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic America (probably) where some cataclysm has burned large swaths of the world and destroyed most, maybe all, life on the planet. It follows a man and his son who have no names on a road that has no name to a coastal destination that has no name. Their task is to find heat and scrounge supplies and food from a land that has been picked over or burnt in place over years. Judging from the age of the boy, born just after the cataclysm, it’s been eight or ten years. Nothing except the humans left over is alive. So the only food they find is whatever they find along the way, usually in cans in off the road, corpse ridden houses. It’s cold and wet. And the people they encounter are cannibals or thieves…or both.
The man has a pistol with two bullets. He uses one to kill a cannibal along the way. And so he’s left with the question that he doesn’t ask out loud. We understand it to be his trial though. When it comes to the end, when the other choice is to let his son be eaten and raped, will he have the strength to kill him to avoid it.
The answer is no. Yet McCarthy goes to great lengths to make the point that there is no easy future. And there is no place for hope to grow roots. Hope is a burden carried along by who is left over. And so the Man carries that burden down the road for 241 pages.
The man has a child. A child is hope incarnate. But in a world with no hope that hope is a form of torture. It seeps out in vestigial conversations with the boy about how to live and how to be. How to “carry the fire.” Starved hope was the undoing of the boy’s mother who brought a child into a dead world weeks after it died. The man wouldn’t let them end themselves. So she ended herself in a flashback. And so the story is just the two of them.
We never learn what caused the apocalypse. We’ve been conditioned by disaster movies and our current technological capabilities to believe that we’ll have some understanding of our end. The terrifying reality is that if something were to destroy our food supply and turn out the lights forever overnight, nearly everyone left on earth wouldn’t know why. After we’d be consumed with finding food and heat. We wouldn’t know why forever. Every form of life that’s ever come and go on this planet has died out ignorant of the cause of its extinction. By never letting us know what happened, the author lets us know we’d be the same. But we’d carry with us the consciousness of words that described things that will never exist again.
“Do you think there might be crows somewhere? I don’t know. But what do you think? I think it's unlikely. Could they fly to Mars or someplace? No. They couldn’t. Because it's too far? Yes.”
McCarthy is known for the detailed violence in his books. And so there’s some celebration of the “hardness” of them. In The Road, the violence is simply part of the setting. McCarthy writes about the West or the South or post-apocalypse in times when violence was part of the setting. He handles it plainly but with the detail reserved for a rolling countryside or the view from a passing train. It’s just there running in the background. It’s not the story. The story is the setting and what it does to the people.
No one has plot armor in The Road. Or most McCarthy’s books. Not the man. Not the Boy. Not his mother. Not a pregnant woman. Not her newborn child harvested for food. There is no lovable dog that accompanies them along the way. He would have been eaten years ago. And so the harshness of the world is set.
I have two perspectives of my own to bring into a discussion on The Road. The first is my experience in war. And the notion that no matter what the setting, there’s a reality of good and evil. The good don’t eat each other. And they don’t steal things from the living because whatever they have is all they have left to keep them alive. The good have rules, even if it means their end. They’re not complicated. They’re so simple a child could understand them. And in following comes the fire of humanity.
Don’t let anyone tell you that war means the rules aren’t important. The rules is where hope lives.
The second perspective is that I carry some version of hope disease that The Man hauls down the road in his shopping cart. I’m a special needs father with a cognitively challenged son that won’t ever live independently. One day I’m going to die. Every bit of progress he makes and hard fought gain up his too steep hill won’t ever be enough for him to protect himself from the thieves and cannibals. I’m going to hand him over to someone one day. And I don’t know who. My hope is that I stay on the road for long enough to find them.
Deconstructed, this is the fear most parents have that expires somewhat when their kids reach adulthood. For my wife and I, it doesn’t. The road goes on long after we’re gone.
Reading The Road is an immersion exercise in that fear. The sort of thing I needed to write down.