Demob Happy

Carry the fire

9/10

I was initially surprised to hear that ‘The Road‘, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and his son’s quest for survival in an America that has befallen some unspecified environmental or nuclear catastrophe. All animal life has disappeared, including most human life, and ash covers everything. Food is scarce, and the survivors have resorted to murder, theft and in some cases slavery and cannibalism. The man and his boy travel the eponymous ‘Road’ to the coast, a quest without any clear objective bar the possibility of encountering other ‘good guys’, and avoiding the ‘bad guys’ as much as possible. Distinguishing whom is whom, however, is not easy, and the tension created by this is brilliantly rendered. Furthermore, and perhaps even more evocatively, is the way McCarthy depicts the protagonists’ struggle against the elements in an unyieldingly huge and savage landscape. Their need to huddle together to sustain warmth in the winter nights is as palpable as their paranoia about getting caught by the ‘bad guys’.

On a recent blog post on John Self’s ever-excellent ‘Asylum‘, he asked speculatively if readers could suggest any decent novels about fatherhood. I made a couple of suggestions but was admittedly a bit stumped. ‘The Road’, however, strikes me most as a novel about the depth of a father’s love for his son (the novel is dedicated to John Francis McCarthy) and his will to protect him at any cost. As a father-to-be, for me almost everything else in this novel felt secondary - at least on an emotional level. McCarthy reserves some faith in the endurance of the human spirit - referred to on several occasions directly as a “fire” that the protagonists endeavour to keep burning - despite framing man as culpable for his own catastrophe. The Road is also a hymn to nature’s brutal permanence - there is no suggestion that the world itself is poised to end, just that humanity is on the brink. Not exactly ‘28 Days Later’ then, with much of the threat (flesh-eating paedophiles etc.) more suggestive than explicit, and all the more frightening for it.

Survival - or “issues of life and death”, as the author put it in one interview - is a theme in many of McCarthy’s books, from the ‘Border Trilogy‘ to ‘No Country for Old Men’. His characters often undergo transformative and transgressive experiences on the margins of civilisation, often pitted against the wilds or manifestations of evil (”the bad guys” again) that seem more spectral, or at least representative, than necessarily ‘real’. Like his frontier-centred novels, The Road is in deep awe of the American wilderness - it’s desolate beauty, it’s emptiness. Has a more desolate novel ever been written? I haven’t read one. Carry the fire.