Road to Nowhere

If happiness writes white, Cormac McCarthy writes black. Open this novel anywhere, and you’ll likely find the word “black” or, failing that, the words “gray”, “dark” or “dead”.  And in the end, this bleak persistence wears you down.

There are no laughs here.  Apocalypse has devastated life and there is ash everywhere.  The man and his son, dispossessed even of their names, track the road relentlessly south.  Freezing cold, hunger and the inhuman threaten always to outrun them.  The man’s own “absolute truth” is the crushing black vacuum of the universe.  But he keeps going for as long as he can for his boy.  He tells him they’re “carrying the fire”, though more likely he is preparing to pass it on, hardening the boy in the process.

On McCarthy’s unremittingly gray-black-dead-dark canvas, there are glossy flourishes that bring to mind the Greeks: the “banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp”; the ragged duo are seen “treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel”.  And in a neat touch, the starving man literally stumbles upon a small harvest of apples in the undergrowth of an old forgotten orchard. Hard, dry, brown, almost tasteless, but a source of life nonetheless.  Act of God or random happening? Later the boy tries to talk to God but finds that the best thing is to talk to his absent father, and he’s told that that’s alright since the breath of God is passed from man to man through all time.

But there aren’t enough flourishes to carry you through.  Although a short book, I found myself wading through it, obscurely doubting points of feasibility.  There is little dialogue to speak of.  The conversations between the man and boy fall flat, maybe because they’re not imagined – many, we’re told, are verbatim real life exchanges between the author and his son, to whom the book is dedicated. I never seem to have had the will or capacity to relate much to these other worldly nuclear settings, so maybe I should have read Blood Meridian instead – any maybe I will.