The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is one of my favourite books. It is beautiful, full of incredible language and powerful, stark imagery, and yet at the same time, full of terror, heartache, and the most disgusting depths of humanity. I read The Road  a couple years ago, over the span of a week, during a particularly dreary Vancouver fall. I will never read this book again.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy the The Road, I most certainly did. It's just that the essence of what makes this book so powerful to me lies in the first read. A favourite author of mine, Patrick Rothfuss, has said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that you only get one first read, and it's precious. And I agree with him on that point. He then continues to say that the second read, the informed read, reveals new truths and elements to a book that weren't apparent on the first read. And again, I agree with him. However, I think some books can only be read once, the power that lies in that first read is so tangible, so real, that it simply cannot be recreated. The Road is one such book, at least to me. I loved every page, every word of this book, I struggled to put this book down, and yet I don't ever plan on opening it's pages for a second reading.

If you've never read a McCarthy novel, you should know that he doesn't really write what I would call happy books. Having read several of his works, I can say I've never finished one of his books and found myself uplifted or happy at the end. If you have read his work before, you know what I'm taking about. Upon finishing this book I found myself feeling exposed, like and open wound, with raw emotion laying on the surface of my being as I closed the back cover of the book and set it aside. The Road brought me to tears, and left me in a daze for several hours.

The book is essentially summed up by the back cover text written above, and needs no further summary. It's a classic McCarthy novel, full of his signature barebones, stark prose and incredible storytelling, but I think this might be McCarthy at his best. Not a single word felt out of place or extraneous, this is a meticulously crafted piece of art. For example:

Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.

Not exactly a joyous piece of prose, but incredibly powerful in the context of the themes of the novel. And yet within this quote lies one of the most central themes of The Road, the power of love to triumph in the face of adversity. The very world in which the father and the son live in this novel is adversity incarnate, it's a hostile world, inhabited by hostile people. No food grows, for nothing grows anymore in this grey and desolate world, all that's left is all that's left. Life itself holds on desperately in the form of the people still left on this world, and this desperate struggle is embodied no better than in the bond between a father and his son. With a furious love this father fights to ensure his son's survival, even as the world around them works with such apathy to kill them. During one of the most intense, visceral and frankly horrifying moments of the novel, the father says to the son: 

My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?

Such is the love of the father for his son, he will, and does, kill to protect his boy. The contradiction of love and extreme violence, the idea that such beauty stems from the same place as such terrible violence is one that reoccurs throughout The Road. The father resorts often to violence to protect his son, and yet the son never once makes a violent action or has a violent thought, as his father seeks to protect his innocence through bloodshed if necessary.

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

The boy seems to be the embodiment of pure, unsullied goodness, untainted by blood, a Christ-like figure, even as his father's hands are stained by it. Such a contrast of unbridled good, innocent love, of light itself, against the dark, bloodstained darkness of violent passion and unconstrained desperate love is incredibly beautiful, and shows McCarthy at his best.

You have my whole heart. You always did.

The Road is an incredible book, and one I would urge any lover of literature to read, even if only once. This is a book that will at once show you the power of love to triumph in the face of fear and death, and the bleak existential hopelessness of the human condition.

If only my heart were stone.