So, Cormac McCarthy gets rave reviews, and for The Road no less than his westerns. Alan Warner, a novelist I enjoy very much, loves it.
www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/nov/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview4 But I just read it, and I found it unsatisfying.
First, the good: clearly McCarthy can write. His vocabulary is enormous and inventively applied; when he pares down, you feel it. Plus, he does generate some sympathy for his characters. I was drawn in to the man's life, and I did enjoy his love for the boy.
But there are so many problems. First, the lack of names. It's a McCarthy standard, and in other books I can accept that it might work to create an everyman. But here the father is not just an everyman, he is the allman, the totality of humanity. The other "people" in the book are almost all monsters, or rendered inhuman in some other way. But as I didn't believe the mythos, the lack of name simply became irritating after a while. When at the end, the father dies, and the son "knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again." This just calls attention to the literary trope of namelessness. McCarthy seems to have forgotten that the universal is found in the specific: giving the man more of a name and an identity would make him more representative of humanity as a whole, not less.
Second, the setting. Literary critics seem to find the post-apocalyptic setting very exciting, but to SF readers it's kind of old hat. So I'm looking for somthing interesting in it. McCarthy chooses not to detail what the apocalypse was, but that's OK. My question is: how did the apocalypse kill every living thing on the planet, without killing all the humans? Apparently all the birds, fish and mammals are gone, and the plants are no longer fruitful. The trees seem to be dead. What about the bacteria? And how did those people survive?
Next, given that people have survived, why has society disintegrated so totally? What is McCarthy trying to say when he posits that 12 years after the apocalypse, the survivors are almost without exception cannibal rapists? Women seem to be being farmed for infant flesh. Why would that happen? I don't get how you can expect to be taken seriously if you can't explain what's going on in people's heads, and McCarthy completely fails to do that. He just posits a zombie horde. Fine - but if you're going to have a zombie horde, have a zombie horde. Don't pretend that those are real people.
And finally, the characters. As I've said, they do draw you in through the writing, and their love is well drawn. But McCarthy gives us so little of either of them. My favourite part of the book is when finally the boy shows some development. After a hard moral choice, the boy is crying:
"The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared.
The boy didnt answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.
You're not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.""
But this is the only line in the book where we're allowed close to them. The man has memories of childhood, but they are so abstract that we can't invest in them. The boy plays with a toy truck, but we're not allowed to see how he plays.
Two comparisons that come up in many reviews are Lord of the Flies and Samuel Beckett. Both of these point up the deficiencies in McCarthy's book. In Lord of the Flies, Golding takes great care to lay out every step of the path into savagery. It's a work of psychology and political insight. There's none of that in The Road. McCarthy creates a zombie holocaust, doesn't care to tell us how it happened. For me, a reader in China, this is particularly frustrating. Just 50 years ago, in the great famine of the Great Leap Forward, China experienced relatively widespread cannibalism. I would love to read a book, fiction or nonfiction, which tackled that subject. But The Road doesn't tackle it. It merely presents horrific scenes that I feel I've seen before - is the cannibal harvest of The Road much different to the implanting of eggs in Aliens? Or the twisted family of Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Yet both those films used the eating of humans to much greater effect.
Beckett often does dump characters in bizarre, unexplained contexts; but then he has his characters react to their situation, and to each other, with the full range of human emotion. Beckett's characters are funny, pathetic, brave, pedantic, inspired, confused... rounded. McCarthy's man and boy are ciphers. They love; they fear; but they don't seem to play, get bored, get frustrated, revel, plan, wonder, offend, or take action. Throughout the book, the characters are very much passive victims of fortune, just doing what necessity dictates. This would be fine if they were just the tools through which the author explored an interesting world. But the world of The Road is not interesting, nor is McCarthy interested in it.
The Road felt to me more like an experiment than a novel. McCarthy seemed to be saying, how much can I take out of the novel, and still succeed? Take away names, character, background, hope; take away complex plot; take away motivation; take away women. Take away punctuation. Leave two emotions (despair and love) and beautiful writing, and have you still got a novel? The answer is yes, The Road is a novel. And many people seem to think it's a good one. But I can't read it without feeling that these formal experiments have been done before, and that in this day and age, we want more from our novelists, not less.