Musings from the road, on "The Road"

It is perhaps the worst kept secret in the world that I really do not like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and, given that there are so many bad books that are irretrievably awfully written, trite and useless, it does make one wonder why I save so much ire for this particular book. It has won significant awards, is widely read, apparently popular, has a film and so on and so on.

It is actually quite well written, although the lack of apostrophes is a little coy given that this is not a written memoir from either of the main actors, and it certainly conveys emotion - this is not some fourth-rate Twilight clone, dressed up with "grim and joyless sadomasochism" (to quote Matt Groening) in order to titillate. It is, however, a rather dire rehashing of some quite tired science fiction tropes and it is, to my reading, riddled with McCarthy's guilt that he will ultimately be a bad father to his (real) sons, combined with a peculiarly 21st Century approach to doing absolutely fucking nothing to make any positive contribution in the landscape of his protagonists.

McCarthy is not, to my reading, a science fiction author and, to be honest, be may not be claiming to be, but when you write into a post-apocalyptic genre, you tread into the area and it's probably helpful to have read a couple of other works along similar lines - "The Last Man", "A Boy and his Dog", "Barefoot in the Head", "The Time Machine", "A Canticle for Liebowitz", "The City of Ember", "The Stand", "The Postman", "Shadow on the Hearth" or about half of Wyndham spring to mind as stuff you could find in most libraries that would be a good starting place to see how long we have been flogging this particular horse. (Although, with the rapine and cannibalistic obsession that makes little sense at this level, Wyndham's nasty little piece of treacherous misanthropy "The Death of Grass" may well have been on his reading list.) Goodness, even picking up another non-SciFi author who has deigned to write into the genre and chewing his way through the tired, grey, gruel of "Oryx and Crake" might have been a good start. Atwood missed many marks in O&C but at least you felt that the major characters were alive and had a reason to keep living. "The Road's" great failure is that, while it transports you into the awfulness of the environment very effectively, it fails to really make you care about what's happening because the doom is wound up to 11 and all that anybody is currently doing is delaying the inevitable. With no plants, no animals and no sun, the swollen and slime-ridden grey sea may as well roll over the lot and the final paragraph of the book, delivered just to ensure that we don't walk away in too positive a frame, does just that. Everything we are is gone. Everything we were is lost. We are spent hope, dashed dreams and ashes.

Michael Chabon also doesn't classify this as science fiction, he places it as a "lyrical epic of horror" and, in some respects, I have to agree with him. This is the kind of horror you feel in a bad dream, where there is no way out and you can't do anything. It is, as noted, written well and lyrical is not a bad term here. Epic? No. Epics have, for me, grand themes of heroism and the struggle of the small against the insurmountable. An account of the earthworms of Sardinia is not an epic, nor is this account of small white grubs slowly dying as they stagger from useless activity to useless activity. Their purpose is ill-defined and artificial, there is no heroism, there is no grand challenge and, ultimately, this is a bus timetable of transits between tiny and uninteresting towns with occasional outbreaks of populism and deference to rape and cannibalism themes.

It reminds me of the irritating and offensive inactivity of Thomas Covenant in Donaldson's books - "Ooooh, I'm only a leper." It doesn't stop Covenant getting in the way, nor does it stop one of the most egregiously gratuitous uses of 'scenery rape' in fantasy writing from occurring but it does stop him doing anything good. I can hit my hand with a hammer by myself and get depressed, if I want destructive activity with no positive outcome.

My greatest objection to this book is ultimately that the father does nothing at all to really change the lot he's been dealt. He doesn't try to really stop his wife from leaving to kill herself. He doesn't help anybody else in distress unless the boy forces him to - and, in fact, he slams the door on terrified and half-eaten people to cover his own arse while he runs away. Finally, he has the audacity to wave a loose and feckless belief in God around (Goodness will find the boy) and then, after he has finally died, Goodness finds his son and his utter lack of any sense of action is rewarded with a happy ending.

Please. Spare me. McCarthy has noted that the entire story was driven by a trip to El Paso that he took with his younger son, where he pictured apocalypse in the form of fires on the hills. The book is dedicated to the younger son, who was born when McCarthy was around 65 and the the vision of apocalypse took place when his son was 5. It is hardly surprising that a man in his 70s feels concerned about his ability to continue to look after his son and, to its detriment, McCarthy's quite understandable (and reasonable) concerns about who will look after his son once he dies, most likely before the son reaches 21, pervade this novel. The novel has been widely praised for its notes on the environment - the fact that we would all die without a functioning biosphere. Regrettably, this leaves me cold. There is no positive action that anyone could take with a disaster of this magnitude and far better works than this have raised the spectre of nuclear (or similar) destruction with protagonists who did more than two-dimensionally crawl through the landscape slowly awaiting their inevitable deaths.

The role of women, except as set pieces for reckless fecundity or rape foci, is largely non-existent in this work. There are two major exceptions. One is a woman at the end who stays with a dead man and, when asked if she was left behind by her group, says "I left myself behind", reclaiming her autonomy in the face of the father's assumption of female subordination. Classifying himself as a 'good guy', the father neither rapes her, nor eats her dead companion, but he does happily wander away and leave a single woman to her fate, having made much before of the threats of the road. The other is his wife who sees that the species is doomed and kills herself to spare herself the slow death of starvation. Her action stands as one of the most rational approaches to this farcical doom world. Where other people are dragging dog-collar wearing, scantily-clad rent boys behind their murder and rape wagons (I wish I were making this up) and making fun jingly sounds like a group of psychopathic Morris Dancers,  she has looked at the giant ball of depressing crap that is left and cried "enough". It's a pity that there are so few dialogue pieces for women in this work, because they do seem to have their brains engaged, unlike the remnants of the men, who have been watching far too much Mad Max.

What actually happened to the other 52% of the population, anyway? Where are all the women? Were the nuclear weapons secreted in feminine hygiene products, mysteriously activating in a way that switched the balance to 10% woman - or did the beasts that we all are just rape them all to death and then eat them? This is one small example of why this story is, fundamentally, so damn silly. In order to make this world so bleak, so hopeless and so grey, McCarthy had to keep layering ecological disaster after ecological disaster - but not so much that everyone was already dead. It feels clumsy because it is clumsy.

I don't mind reading down into the depths of despair but I do object to having my head forced underwater through cumbersome and tired tropes weighing me down because someone wanted to scare himself into activity. There is so much more that this work could have been. We could have found out some more about the world itself but, rather than this being a light touch, I sense a lack of underlying world building - the fires on the hills were the most important driver here and explanation of those townships that might still exist or what the hell 'road agents' really are just get in the way of the gloom. It is the fact that, with some guidance or a little more knowledge of what had gone before, this could have been a greatly moving work where the final ending didn't feel like deus ex machina (although, of course, it is clearly deus ex patri, a father is entitled to the hand of God's intervention if he's a "good guy") This is so random in many respects. The characters have no entitlement to their salvation, unless you accept doctrinal innocence and wrap that up with all of the offenders dying before they reach the promised land, but even then that doesn't gel because the 'saviour' "good guy" is obviously more successful and active. He has scars from fighting because he's got involved. Is McCarthy turning around in the last page of the book and saying "Yeah, the father. He's a loser." and, if so, does that get him off the hook? Is this a reflection on himself or is he the guy with the shotgun shells?

I realise that many people will point to the actions of the father and say "He looked after his son" and there is certainly that. However, it's apparent that this isn't enough and it would never have been enough. Looking after his son would really have involved building a stronger, surviving community. At the end, he can't bring himself to kill the boy and save him from (let's just assume I throw some ugly words in here) - then he dies. Then a miracle occurs! This is not paternal care - this is empty fantasy.

This is an interesting book. I think it is more interesting because of how it reflects on the author, our times, awards committees and what passes for science fiction in the mainstream than because of the story that it contains. You may disagree.