ROSEMARY MAC CABE

I generally dislike seeing the film before reading the book, but in the case of The Road, it was a case of too much, too soon – or something. When I saw The Road, and some of you may already have read this, I had no idea what it was about. So when I read the book, I was that little bit better prepared than I had been on the cold, snowy morning I found myself in the Denzille Lane Cinema.

There’s no doubt that Cormac McCarthy is a great writer, grammatical nuance aside. (In the post-apocalyptic vision of the future McCarthy has presented, the word “don’t” has lost its apostrophe; Spanish is written with a lower-case “s”, as if to say that tradition, or even language, has no place in this devastated vista.) And The Road is one of those rare books, pared down to its essential elements, that manages to tug at the heartstrings just as effectively – if not moreso – as one of John Banville’s works of tongue-twisting prose.

There is no plot background, little character development, no meandering asides to distract from the essential story – which is, “the world has ended; some people survive and no one knows who are the good guys and who the bad, but love will shine a (dim, barely visible) light”. The Road is horrific; it is heartbreaking, it is tortuous, each repellent scene is worse than the last, and better than the next.

If you’re looking for hope, McCarthy has none to give. I’m sure there’s a lesson in The Road, but I refuse to kowtow to these shockingly obvious references to environmental and ecological matters. Instead, the lessons I gleaned are thus: keep a tank of petrol in the garage, stockpile canned goods, get a gun and an arsenal of bullets, and don’t have children unless they’re for eating. The future sure is golden, ladies and gents.

Related posts:

1. 2010, book four: Daughter of the River
2. 2010, book one: Shutter Island
3. 2010, book three: La Candy