Front Page Reviews & AIR

Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made.

Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be.

The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.

The silence.

-C. McCarthy, The Road

It's gray ash as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by an occasional orange flash of fire or red trickle of blood, and the earth is getting cold.  Too cold to survive another Winter around here, anyways.  Father and son must start the long slow lurch Southward, down the remnants of a road, with a small cart, a few cans of food, and a pistol..."along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire."  It's been ten years since the end of civilization, we gather, and the few survivors have turned cannibalistic.  All but a small remnant, that is, who are carrying the light. 

McCarthy manages to be at once chilling and strangely sacramental at every turn.  “There is no God,” he suggests at one point, “and we are his prophets.”  But then again God’s absence on the road is the least of your worries; it is the vulnerability of the boy that keeps you vigilant in night, and being toward death: “If he is not the word of God then God never spoke.”

Its hard to think of a finer American stylist writing today.  McCarthy is in absolute control of his craft in each of his novels, in every sentence, and none the less in The Road, his most accessible work.  The book has a strange lyric epic quality that puts it in the company of literary history’s greatest tales of journey and quest.  It is Gilgamesh, Abraham, Dante, and Basho.