They’re calling this McCarthy’s masterpiece and it’s not difficult to see why. The setting itself is not new: America has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland, transformed by war and catastrophe to a new Dark Age. Perhaps this has already happened. Technology is useless, law and order have broken down, and people have to learn the basic animal skills all over again.
Yes, this has been done before, most notably in Stephen King’s The Stand, in which survivors of a killer flu virus regroup and fight it out over the Colorado mountains. It’s a timeless sub-genre, and also a narcissistic one; imagine what fun you could have if you were the last man on earth. In King’s book, the characters were guided by the opposing forces of good and evil. In The Road, there is no God, no destiny: there is just a man and a boy travelling across the country.
They want to reach the coast, but it’s not clear why or what they will do when they get there. It is never explained what has reduced civilisation to rubble; no one comes across a frayed newspaper cutting about nuclear war or the election of Jenna Bush. Nothing survives of the world before except the man’s dim memories of his wife. There are other characters, but they are distant threats or thieves in the night, seen in shadow and detail. The man and the boy are extremely wary of the people they meet on the road, and for good reason. Here is McCarthy describing a bandit army:
Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of the pregnant, and lastly a supplementary cohort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.
This isn’t a political book, but it’s interesting how humanity seems to go back to the basic medieval power relationships when everything else has come crashing down.
Most of the dynamic is between the man and the boy, never named but completely distinct and well realised. The man is firm but fair: he protects the boy from the road’s dangers and also from the boy’s own innocence. The kid is naturally generous and upset by violence. What drives them on through the road’s trials is the man’s blazing certainty that, ‘We’re the good guys… We’ve got the fire.’
The book differs from post-apocalypse fiction by atmosphere and style; undivided by chapters, and told in terse, descriptive paragraphs. These have the urgency of a phone call in the middle of the night. McCarthy’s superb prose mingles with his characters’ dialogue and thoughts, and this has the effect of plunging you right into his world of struggle and darkness. But what makes The Road worthy of a contemporary masterpiece is its searing humanity and compassion. The ending is brutal, but also holds out some hope; there is hope on the road.