The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2008 of the 2006 publication)
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cormac McCarthyEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05
ISBN: 0307472124
Number of pages: 287
Publisher: Vintage International
Book Reviews of The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2008 of the 2006 publication)
Book Review: "All that darkness and cold...."
Summary: 4 Stars
The Road? A good book to read by candle light while you shiver in bed, unbathed for days, with the flu.
From No Country for Old Men (as best as I recall),
"...in my dream my father rode past me, and he was carrying fire, in a horn, like they used to in the olden days...he didn't say a word, just rode on past. And somehow I knew he was going on ahead, in all that darkness and cold, to prepare a fire, and he'd be waiting for me when I got there."
And The Road,
"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him."
This is all of Cormack McCarthy. Eloquent, slow studies in the candle blown out, the smoldering wick in the darkness.
So yes, McCarthy follows in the tradition of Herman Melville, without the tedious lessons in seamanship. It's a cold, dark world where love is still so lonely, where life is desperate and crushes easily like dried leaves, but it is all we have to cling to, so we do, so faithfully, with the severest grip, slowly pulverizing it in our hands.
True, for McCarthy some of the babies born in the dark will "carry the fire". But they will do it just like their dying fathers did the nights before, down the same road, in the same broken, limping way, forever. This is all of life. For a moment we cling to these poor, confused children as if they were things of beauty. Then we send them into the dark with wide-eyed talk of "carrying the fire". Is that a thing of beauty? Is this story?
The literary types tell us,
"The anti-transcendentalists reflected a pessimistic attitude and focused on man's uncertainty and limited potential in the universe. They viewed nature as vast and incomprehensible, a reflection of the struggle between good and evil. The anti-transcendentalist felt humans were depraved and had to struggle for goodness. "
Yes, that's McCarthy. True, he gives us very fine writing. Sometimes very touching. Very much the same as in No Country for Old Men. Sometimes the moves are a bit too much--the coke can scene for one--the last and only one he'll ever drink? Or the "last train" scene--but McCarthy is trying to silhouette the tiny child with even more than the charred forests and corpses. It's not just the death of life, of humans like his father, but of humanity that is the boy's back drop. This is not cannibal rape gangs. This is the pathetic exhaustion of his mother's suicide, laced with her dull wish to murder her son, too. As in No Country, where the sheriff despairs for the human race in modern times, putting down his badge and waiting for senility and death. The same pessimistic vision mixed with just enough hope and action to keep us reading, but is really designed to marinate us in a bracing, endless despair. So much like, I imagine, the mind of the man who wrote it. Overthrown but still very capable.
Yet in this story, unlike in No Country for Old Men, even evil is lobotomized by McCarthy's debasing empire. Here there is none of evil's eloquence, and so good has none, either. It's a story about one nation, wretchedness for all. Carrying the fire? Don't believe it.
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