All artists are unique, but some are more unique than others. No one else writes like Cormac McCarthy, and Cormac McCarthy writes like no one
else. There are the Greeks, of course—the odyssey that is The Road reads as old and as immediate as the Odyssey—also the authors of the King James Bible; Melville, too; Faulkner a little; and Beckett, surely. But the links are tenuous. McCarthy’s work stands proud of the literary landscape, like one of those majestic, sharp-shadowed buttes in Monument Valley, though his
colours can be as delicate as the palest shades of the Painted Desert.
Trite analogies, perhaps, but the very triteness points to the difficulty of finding adequate terms by which to characterise the work of this extraordinary novelist, one of the very finest at work today, in America and in the wider world.
A shilling life will give you all the facts, as Auden’s poem has it.
McCarthy is famously jealous of his privacy, and quite right too—we live in the Age of Babble—and the facts of his life that we have, such as they are, should be taken with caution as to their facticity. Of them, we shall mention here only those that seem relevant to the work.
He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, and four years later
was moved with his family to Knoxville, where he grew up. Does this make him a Southern writer, even a ‘Southern Writer’? Certainly his fiction is suffused with the harsh lights and harsher accents of the Deep South, yet the classic radiance it exudes sets it in a realm, ancient and elemental, far and away beyond the specifics of mere place.
McCarthy’s father, a lawyer, worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, so young Cormac—or Charles, his baptismal name until he changed it, in a nod to his Irish roots—would have been a product of the middle class. The McCarthys were Catholic, and Cormac became an altar boy, which is surely
not insignificant, given the liturgical cadences of his prose style. A thing that can be said for the Catholic faith, as distinct from the Catholic Church, is that it accepts, indeed insists upon, the tragic predicament of man in his fallen state. Being a melding of the heterodoxy of the Greeks—their gods
became Christianity’s saints—and the monotheism of the Jews, Catholicism accepts the inescapability of suffering, along with its redemptive power.
The way that McCarthy’s pair of survivors in The Road are bound upon is both the blood-bespattered Via Dolorosa, and the parched track leading down from the other side of Golgotha.
After studying at the University of Tennessee, McCarthy left without graduating, joined the Air Force, and was stationed for two years in Alaska: from the fiery South, then, to the frozen North.
For a time in the 1960s he lived on the island of Ibiza, a rackety and, for a writer, or an artist of any kind, a dangerous place, in those days, as anyone who was there can attest: local colour that is too bright can blind the most discriminating eye, and too much of a good time is always bad. McCarthy
has been quoted as saying that the friends he has are people who have given up drinking. This is either an instance of McCarthy being droll—his humour is subtle to the point of opacity—or a sly admission of riotous days in the long ago. His novel Suttree, which the reader will inevitably take to
be autobiographical at least in some of its aspects, is awash with booze, and not in a happy way.
McCarthy was married three times, and has two sons, the younger of whom, John Francis, was born in 1998, when McCarthy was sixty-five. It is to this son that The Road is dedicated, not least because he was the inspiration for it, as the author acknowledged in an interview on the Oprah Winfrey show, of all places, in 2007. This was his first appearance on television, and put paid to the notion that he is a recluse, a term journalists apply to people who decline to talk to journalists.
McCarthy’s literary career began early, if one may speak of such a writer having something as humdrum as a ‘career’. While he was still at college in Tennessee he wrote and published some short stories, and won a prize, the first of many that were to come to him over the ensuing years. He published a novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965, the first of a dozen or so works of fiction. He has also produced short-story collections, plays and screenplays. He is the semi-official writer in residence at the Santa Fe Institute for
scientific research, and has published a theoretical essay, ‘The Kekulé Problem’, in a popular science magazine. A man of parts, then.
There are three distinct, major modes in which McCarthy’s fiction operates. There is the High Baroque of Blood Meridian (1985), the Violent Western Pastoral of the Border Trilogy (1992–1998) and the Brute
Bleakness of Child of God (1973)—one of his finest works, a short, mesmerising novel about a serial killer, inexplicably neglected even by
some of his most enthusiastic admirers—and The Road, first published in 2005, the masterpiece of his late phase, if not, indeed, the masterpiece of his writing life.
In the Oprah Winfrey interview—how desperately one clutches at the
few available scraps of authenticated testimony!—McCarthy spoke of the seed of the novel putting out its first root in the middle of the night in an El Paso hotel room where he was staying with John Francis, who was then four years old. While the son was sleeping the father stood at the window, gazing into the deserted darkness and listening to the lonesome sound of
trains going past, and toying with the thought of the town being consumed in some future catastrophe. He had, he said, ‘an image of these fires up on the hill and everything being laid waste’. Such images abound in the book the beginnings of which were implanted in his mind that Texas night:
A dead swamp. Dead trees standing out of the gray water trailing gray and relic hagmoss. The silky spills of ash against the curbing. He stood leaning on the gritty concrete rail. Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible to see at last how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.
Despite the dystopic opulence of such passages, The Road is marked by an overall spareness in style, content and design. The figures of the unnamed
—the unnameable—man and boy, the father and his son, journeying together towards no real destination through the landscapes of destruction, recall to us the same theme, the same image, that recurs throughout Beckett’s work, especially in the Trilogy of novels of his middle years, and in many of the late pieces. The lean lineaments of McCarthy’s epic—and it is epical, both in conception and execution—are Beckettian mainly in that they trace the outlines of last things, last times.
The premise of the book is simple, and horrifying. The world as it was known to the human species came to an end some years before, taking with it most of that species, and, it seems, all other living creatures too. We are not told what kind of cataclysm it was that brought about civilisation’s extinguishing, though we assume it was man-made. Some lights were seen falling from the sky, and soon the world was ablaze; now all that remains
anywhere is wreckage—even the ocean is moribund—and the endless toing and froing of the ubiquitous and emblematic ‘silky spills of ash’. The man and the boy have been on the road for a long time, ‘each the other’s world entire’. They are in rags, and all they possess is piled in a supermarket trolley, one of the wheels of which is defective—of course.
That wheel is one of many such homely details, minutely imagined but not especially remarked, with which the book abounds. Indeed, the
persuasive juxtaposition of the mundane and the apocalyptic is a sign of the book’s quiet greatness. McCarthy understands that exactitude is essential if the reader is to be convinced of the haecceity, the living thereness, of a world utterly beyond everyday experience. In this he sets himself in a direct line from Swift and Kafka; Lilliput and Gregor Samsa’s bedroom are vividly real to us because their creators imagined them into being by the
force of a concentrated imagining, the glare of which still generates the transformation, in our mind’s eye, of the fantastical into an all too plausible reality. This is the power of art, and the art of art is always in the detail.
McCarthy knows this ruined world, because he has been there and travelled it by way of artistic inspiration, a word that embarrasses these sullenly secular times, but the one that in this case best applies. Through the lens of his novelist’s eye he has seen the shrivelled corpses, has registered
the blown ash coating his lips, has felt in his bones the grinding, relentless cold. In the following, relatively light-hearted, passage—in this end-time the heart is not often lightened—the pair of wayfarers are negotiating a
stretch of highway strewn with the remains of scorched and shattered trees:
He fashioned sweeps from two old brooms he’d found and wired them to the cart to clear the
limbs from the road in front of the wheels and he put the boy in the basket and stood on the rear rail like a dogmusher and they set off down the hills, guiding the cart on the curves with their
bodies in the manner of bobsledders.
Here, as on every page, we see with hallucinatory immediacy not only the outlines of the landscape through which the father and his son are bound on
their fraught katabasis, but also the desperation and the determination which drive them on. They will not allow themselves to be lost to the world, even if the world as it once was is lost to them for ever. In this they differ from
the boy’s mother, who, seeing no possible future other than endless pain and sorrow, ignored her husband’s pleas, after ‘the hundred nights they’d sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of
philosophers chained to a madhouse wall’, and departed into the outer dark. ‘She would do it with a flake of obsidian. He’d taught her himself. Sharper than steel. The edge an atom thick.’
The woman’s fears were founded in a horrible reality. There are other
survivors of the catastrophe, most of them ‘the bad guys’, as the boy says, feral creatures wandering through the wastes in search of the means, any means, of survival. Many have turned to cannibalism. No wonder the man saves up the last remaining bullet in the revolver he carries with him at all times: for the son, capture would bring him to a fate far worse than death, and rather than allow it, the father knows what he must do, should the dreadful moment arrive. But will he have the courage to inflict this final, saving cruelty?
Other, rare survivors are mostly glimpsed from afar, their presence attested to by the smoke of their fires, or the strewn bones of the devoured that they leave behind. However, there is a close-up sighting of a horde of these raveners that is as vivid, as compelling and as terrifying as the
nightmarish appearance of the Comanche band in Blood Meridian. Here are their counterparts in The Road:
An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. 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 them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.
The mark of genius here, of course, is the tennis shoes.
McCarthy has spoken of his willingness to allow to the reader any interpretation, philosophical, religious, eschatological, that he or she might
want to bring to the book; for himself, it is the story of a father and his son fighting for survival in the midst of universal destruction. This novelist has never written with more urgency and stark beauty than in these pages.
There are images that will linger in the reader’s mind long after the book has been put aside—to be read another time, it is hoped: this masterpiece requires and rewards repeated visits—some of them exquisite, some
moving, some gruesome almost beyond bearing. In the Book of Revelation according to Cormac McCarthy, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a threnody of surpassing sorrowfulness, simplicity, brilliance and tenderness. The son seeks reassurance in the midst of worldwide torment and despair, and the father provides it as best he can:
We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we? No. Of course not.
Even if we were starving? We’re starving now.
You said we werent.
I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving. But we wouldnt.
No. We wouldnt. No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys. Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire. And we’re carrying the fire. Yes. Okay.
And so they go on, along the unending road.
