The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Alfred A. Knopf, 2006  Pp. 241

Reviewed By Dr. Susan K. Hedahl

             During the last forty years a troubling lineage of significant books has emerged which detail the world in a post-nuclear time:  On the Beach by Nevil Shute, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. are two examples.  McCarthy's book is part of this history.

His work is gruesome, tender, despairing and unflinching.  It is also a work of deep poetic and religious insight and reflection.

             The plot is simple, almost aimless.  McCarthy's writing style is reminiscent of a journal.  Sometime the lyricism of the writing resembles free verse reflections, represented by minimum use of punctuation.  A father and his young son--never called by name-- attempt to make their way to the sea, the father using a set of maps which no longer mark living communities, only roads. The presence and question of God is introduced almost immediately.  As the father wakens early "...he sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land.  He knew only that the child was his warrant.  He said:  If he is not the word of God God never spoke." (4)

             Survival is the primary motif and mover for the father and child.   While obvious human production of food has ceased, not even the land itself is capable of producing anything edible.  Like other elusive humans the pair encounters, they, too ransack empty buildings to find anything to sustain them.   As they seek food, the author begins to allude to the horrors they encounter and must be alert to escape:  "He'd seen it all before.  Shapes of dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled away.  They wall beyond held a frieze of human heads, all faced alike, dried and caved with their taut grins and shrunken eyes." (77)

             The journey provides the father with many reflective times including the suicide of his wife.  "The hundred nights they'd sat up debating the pros and cons of self-destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a mad-house wall." (49) He also attempts to teach the child the difference between right and wrong as the pair must hide from those who would murder them for food and their few goods or as the child yearns to make contact with a dog he hears bark and a child his age he sees hiding the trees near them. Indeed part of the father's work is keeping the child sane as he sees the consequences of unspeakable and barbaric acts on their journey.

             It is clear from the beginning of this tale that the father is dying as he periodically goes off apart from the child to cough up blood, no doubt a death in progress caused by the nuclear aftermath they have endured.  The book moves forward relentlessly and the reader is caught up in the net of hopeless that McCarthy's finely detailed writing projects. What does it matter if they have found an untouched bunker full of food?  Who is following them?  Who will watch out for the child when the father inevitably dies?   

           This book is a story of reality only one moment away in the possibilties of actually waging another war, a nuclear war.  Oddly this is a story of faith.  The radical demand of this book is to read between the lines and wonder:  could I do that?  What choices would I make?

McCarthy's intention is to haunt the reader with what really matters.  He has done a superlative job of that---as only true poets of the spirit can.