Heraclitus described the world as "an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures." With The Road, Cormac McCarthy has taken this image to a morbid extreme -- instead of as a dancing flame, McCarthy shows the world as a darkening mushroom cloud, the likes of which swallows up human past, present and future for all time.
The story follows an unnamed man and his young son, born after bombs started falling, as they trek through what was America. The mother has previously killed herself. The landscape is devoid of all life, save the rapidly-fading remnants of humankind. They are fleeing the onset of winter, which is a relative term -- every day is dark from the ash clouds overhead and freezing precipitation dogs them endlessly. The brightest time of day affords light enough to see only a mile or so about the road. The whole world seems to be going blind. The man has a revolver and two bullets. On top of all this, he is tubercular.
One cannot help but ask, what is the point of reading a novel of such soul-crushing gloom? All that seems to remain for the characters is to either kill themselves or else die some ghastly death. If not for the 250 pages of novel, there would be no reason to suppose a future for the protagonists in so bleak a wastescape. Because of this grim framework, however, the novel sustains itself in the same never-give-up manner as its protagonists.
McCarthy has greatly reduced the scope of the plot-equation used in Blood Meridian and Outer Dark; wanderers with a blood-tie of some kind journey through a dead or dying world, their purpose vague, forgotten or unknowable. The father's purpose is to protect his child -- "He knew only that the child was his warrant" -- but he wonders to himself if it would be better to kill them both.
Unlike other post-apocalyptic worlds (especially those of the Mad Max leather-clad biker-barbarian sort), McCarthy's offers next to nothing in the way of redemption -- the two make their trek towards no particular Eden, no farther land in which humanity plans to rebuild itself. Southward is their only chance, the only plausible direction, in light of the coming winter. The man recalls seeing the last time geese flew south, but it is ambiguous whether they've found somewhere new to stay or never reached their destination at all.
In other works, McCarthy tends to confuse the ethics of his protagonists by way of violent acts performed in response to violent acts. Take, for instance, the nonstop and pervasive violence of Blood Meridian, wherein a small army of Indian-hunting Americans in the Old West is eventually engulfed by their mission, leading to their bloody disintegration and quietus.
In The Road, it is up to the man to answer his child's questions of morality. The man tells the child they are the good guys because they neither eat people nor give up. They are "carrying the fire," he said. When they chance upon a cannibal abattoir full of people begging for salvation, the man and child flee, not stopping to free the human livestock for fear they might kill them in turn. The child parses out their actions later on, but other encounters are less clear-cut. After a storm passes them over, they come upon a lightning-struck man -- a coincidence so unlucky in a luckless world the reader cannot doubt it for a moment -- "He was as burnt looking as the country, his clothing scorched and black. One of his eyes was burnt shut and his hair was but a nitty wig of ash upon his blackened skull." The child tugs at his father's coat, but they do not stop, and the child weeps. The man tells the boy, "We have nothing to give him. We have no way to help him. I'm sorry for what happened to him but we cant fix it." Such are the hard lessons of the road.
McCarthy's style looks as clean and bleak as it reads. The story is told in short paragraphs with clear spaces between each other and a sparse use of punctuation marks. There is the occasional page break, but otherwise little imposed time regulation; no chapters, no indentations, no italics.
McCarthy has toned down his oft-bewildering usage of archaic or esoteric English, perhaps in keeping with the novel's modern (more accurately, post-modern) setting. Words like "bollard" "crozzled" "culvert" and "scrim" pepper the text, but they tend to make contextual sense.
As bleak, godless and dead as the story seems, it transcends lesser works of the genre by leaps and bounds; it is one of the most compelling novels you will ever read, should you chance it.
