 |
| https://dinanaim.wordpress.com/ |
I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and it was a quick read. It took me all of two sittings on two separate days. I saw the film first, years ago, and just happened to pick up the book out of a stack in a thrift store. Many people absolutely love McCarthy and his works, so I decided to read it and...
Good things:
1. Experimental in its use of punctuation. You learn about how sentences sound by reading complex sentences without punctuation as opposed to with (the absence of any quotation marks, particularly, hones an ear for dialogue).
2. The forward momentum. They follow the road. Enough said.
3. The style of the progression of the story. We begin with a dark dream of a creature in some abyss, then we revert to the man's and the boy's journey, the landscape, something terrifying, a moment, an encounter with other human being(s)—"people are hell" theme from Sartre, here—and then landscape again, something terrifying or disturbing, and more landscape. Then, every so often, philosophizing authorial intrusion occurs (and I was usually relieved when it did). An example of that authorial intrusion is when McCarthy's rattles off a poetic...
...a day to shape all other days off of...
...and the like.
There's a pattern of storytelling here which makes for the rhythm of the story and, altogether, the story flows pretty damned well. A page-turner, no doubt.
4. Realism. I think people don't just like but love this book because its basic premise is: What if an apocalyptic tragedy really, truly did happen?
McCarthy's book is like an intellectual response to Hollywoodized apocalyptic hero movies. There's no "bright" ending. There's no color. Anything that could be construed as visually stunning or attractive is deadened to the nth degree. McCarthy wants to get back to good old biblical apocalypse, where people themselves create a kind of hell on earth because of their unspeakable behavior (mostly in the form of cannibalism).
Yes, for the most part, McCarthy sticks along the realist path and this is what people, as far as I can tell, absolutely love about this book—the brutal, authentic truthfulness of it. However, it's actually unrealistic—McCarthy's premise that much of humanity will either revert to some heinous form of barbarism or commit suicide out of despair, and that very, very few will actually "keep the fire" (which is, itself, a continuation of Hobbes' materialist philosophy that man's life, in a state of nature, is "nasty, brutish and short."). This supposes that morality, ethical conduct, civilization and all of our great magnanimous values, are all actually quite frail. I disagree with that premise. They are not frail. Our good and moral and "soft" traits are actually innate to our survival, to cooperation, to our existence as a social animal at all. See science.
5. And, lastly, the novel's shortness, because...
Bad things:
1. The style of the writing. Deadening. It's supposed to be, I know. But that gets me to another thing...
2. The subject. Ultimately depressing, as it's meant to be, if I could take it seriously.
3. The main theme. The struggle against meaninglessness. It's almost never spoken, but the "why go on?" question keeps occurring, ringing like a dong, throughout the work. The landscape itself, the setting, reflects the philosophical idea of our place in the universe. We are but one little blue speck in this vast black vacuum of chaos, and so, what point could we have? There are only small blips of hope in all this vast wasteland and in all of the very consuming (though tersely worded) instances of horror. (I often found myself comparing the novel to a carnival freak show where the visitor is paraded from one shocking scene to the next.)
These small blips of hope come in the form of humor, of love, of a memory or dream, a piece of food, a trinket or object like the flute the man makes for the boy, a word (see use of "okay" repetitively in the dialogue) or in the several references to the "fire" which they carry within themselves. However, these are all but minute sparks in a vast monochrome setting filled with horrible acts and horrible people and lonely desperation and of effigies of everything that was good.
Overall, the struggle against meaninglessness is the all-consuming theme, the big question, that I think McCarthy's book just drips with. And he's not really asking that question about a hypothetical post-apocalyptic world, he's asking it about the modern day.
4. The characters. Yes, the man and the boy are just archetypes. Their dialogue is wooden. Their voices aren't even like the ash that's blowing around everywhere or the trees burnt up every slope. Their voices are cruel —cruel in their deadness to each other and to themselves. In the end, there is the father's last words and the boy's sobbing admonitions and acts of respect, but these are skin-deep at best. They are shallow, stereotypical words because the characters themselves are merely shells.
I've learned that giving a character merely some backstory, like the father has in The Road, isn't enough. We have to understand why they do what they do. McCarthy never identifies exactly what it is that motivates his characters and that is a failure. The best characters in the book are actually not the boy and the man, but the veteran and his companion woman at the end. Why are we, the reader, not allowed to spend any meaningful amount of time with them?
5. The punctuation. To limit the punctuation as much as McCarthy has is to limit your toolbox as a writer. Interesting, in an experimental, postmodernist way, but ultimately no more than an experiment. Not the way to craft a masterwork.
6. What I least liked: the author's intent. I don't know the author's intent precisely, but I can surmise several points of it out of (3.) his main theme. The author's intents are: (1) pessimism about the modern world and where it's going, (2) the difficulty and perhaps impossibility of meaningful father-son relations, (3) the ultimate irrationality (or meaninglessness) of faith in God or faith in a good cause, and, worst of all, (4) the acceptance, if not outright promotion, of nihilism.
I'm done with the thing. I don't even want to watch the movie again.
I've talked a bit more about this book on reddit.
Your own thoughts?