Cormac McCarthy- The Road

Just finished it. Despite its relative shortness, I found it pretty tedious. Only the second McCarthy I've read, and for whatever reason, I just can't get into him - maybe here it was mostly the sort of overuse of dictionary at hand language that kind of bugs me. And the humorlessness?

By the way, I can't recall a single line from the text that specifies what caused the "disaster," or at least none that specify a nuclear war. I kept thinking of it as the result of a comet crashing into the earth - probably because I'd just read Lucifer's Hammer - which this book is sort of the arty version of, at least in my mind. That the only living things left on earth seems to be humans makes it read more dreamlike than a description of some kind of post-apocylptic situation though. I'd expect more hunting and bug eating in the non-dream version

It doesn't specify that it's a nuclear war by using those words, no, but there were a series of massive explosions, followed by firestorms, followed by toxic ash/fallout, an induced "nuclear" winter, and pretty much every living thing dying off. That's what would happen after a nuclear war.

The father sees multiple flashes of light in the distance when the end happens, which also fits multiple nuclear explosions, rather than a big impact event.

My favorite McCarthy novel, though that isn't saying much. Liked it quite a bit, and have thought about it often since, which seems as good a measure of a book's value as any.

Both The Road and No Country for Old Men create worlds in which moral decision-making has no apparent value, and they follow characters who place a great deal of stock in moral-decision making. Reading them together in quick succession, I saw them as an argument that works like this:

1) Coherent social morality is impossible in the absence of a shared belief in God.
2) God has vanished (or is vanishing) from our world, and may not even exist.
3) Coherent social morality is more valuable than any argument you might make about God or anything else.

Thoughts?

First part of that argument is unproved. It is somewhat plausible because pluralistic societies are rare in history, making it difficult to find examples to disprove the contention. Also, I would like to point out that few societies anywhere have actually achived a social morality that is coherent under any detailed examination. The apparent coherence is provided simply by the faithful observance of incoherent traditions.

Thanks, but I was primarly interested in whether people think the argument/theme I'm describing is present in Cormac McCarthy's recent novels.

Otherwise, sure, I more-or-less agree with you, with the caveat that the coherence I'm talking about is better defined as "sticking together" than "making sense".

read this in pretty much one stretch last night, broken up by thai food (felt awesome to be eating actual food) and the tina fey movie "baby mama."

i liked it a lot. definitely a book about the agony of fatherhood maybe more than anything else.

not really sure what some people are getting at with the "macho" thing? the narrator is a desperate scared man who (while he does kill one dude in self-defense) mostly just... scrounges around and wants to die, and not in a particularly heroic way.

the description of a world completely SCRAPED of anything except the most meager scraps, where nothing new can grow or be produced is pretty amazing. i liked details like how he can't tell if the light is fading--the thing about wanting to use a light meter to test it but there's no batteries.

the idea that you wouldn't have the luxury to care if you were being poisoned by radiation every time you ate something off the ground or walked through a burnt-up highway. "if they got wet they'd probably die."

fun stuff!

I started reading this at midnight last night and didn't stop reading until 2:45am. I think this book would actually make a great video game.

-- Tracer Hand, Wednesday, May 9, 2007 9:25 AM (11 months ago) Bookmark Link

this is true actually! you start with 20% health and get 2 bullets and a tarp. there's like 3 healths in the whole game.

uh, how was baby mama?

bleak and unrelenting.

i heard viggo mortensen plays the fetus?

this is true actually! you start with 20% health and get 2 bullets and a tarp. there's like 3 healths in the whole game.

There was actually an early PSX game called Kileak where you were some sort of robotman going through a labryinth, and your energy was constantly depleting. The lower it got, the slower you could move, turn etc. The whole game was trying to desperately delay your inevitable transformation into slow motion and then death as several enemies ran circles around you while you couldn't even more the aiming reticle fast enough to keep up with one of them.

As a game it was awful, but as a simulation of the descent into being useless and pathetic it was useful.

one thing i really liked about this book was WHEN it was set: not immediately after the apocalypse where it's all chaos and ppl are trying to figuring out what to do, nor like 50-100 years after when ppl have begun to rebuild or at least get used to it. it's like the worst of all possible post-apocalyptic worlds. still alive but there's nothing nothing nothing there. nothing has regrown but everything useful's been scraped away.

it's a bummer!

The Road: It's a Bummer

one thing i really liked about this book was WHEN it was set: not immediately after the apocalypse where it's all chaos and ppl are trying to figuring out what to do, nor like 50-100 years after when ppl have begun to rebuild or at least get used to it. it's like the worst of all possible post-apocalyptic worlds. still alive but there's nothing nothing nothing there. nothing has regrown but everything useful's been scraped away.

That's spot-on!

Sorry, hereabouts I ought to say "s1ocki OTM".

it's like the book version of the video game from dreams of sex and stage diving, right?

is there a thread for the movie yet? I can't find it to post this there: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/movies/27road.html

"The sky was blue, the sun so bright that crew members were smearing on sunscreen. A breeze was carrying away the fog pumping feebly from a smoke machine. Even worse, green grass was sprouting everywhere, and there were buds on the trees. Some of the crew had hand-stripped a little sapling of greenery, but the rest of the job would have to be done electronically by Mr. Forker, who was also in charge of sky replacement."

this = hilarious

Generally speaking, that article makes me feel a little better about a film I thought might be a very very bad idea.

Just finished this; loved it, for many reasons. Must write something cogent at some point.

read it in one sitting, and i can definitely see the attraction, but that ending....?

I also read it in one sitting and enjoyed it. Someone told me Viggo was going to play the father in the film so I had him in my mind mind. I could have done with a more entirely miserable ending.

mind mind?

These days I've got into reading 1-star Amazon user reviews of things, because I figure if the criticisms of something in a 1-star review are salient then they might be more trustworthy than the 5-star ravings of most semi-literate idiots. So I read the seven 1-star reviews of this on Amazon, and all of them either criticised The Road for being dull / depressing, or else Cormac's English for being badly punctuated and with poor / incomplete sentences.

Both of these criticisms seem to miss the point of the book; while the setting and events portrayed are miserable beyond belief (so much so that I sat and cried for a few minutes upon finished the book [which I read in about four brief sittings over three days]), I actually found much of the book, largely the interactions and dialogue between father and son, to be incredibly warm and touching. heartening, even. Yes, barbecued babies are horrific, yes the tone and scene was relentlessly grey and ashen and dark, but I think the humanity of their relationship redeemed it.

I liked the way the lack of quotation marks merged their voices and characters to an extent. It was about them learning off each other. I think the use of punctuation and quotations (or lack of) added massively to the overall feel of the book by adding to the sense of the world they were living in, too; dull, monotonous, yet confusing at times.

I don't think the 'event' that lead to the world being in that state is important; Cormac has apparently said that he wrote the book for his young son, and the book does seem to me to be about a father's relationship with his son rather than about some kind of environmental disaster or nuclear fallout survival.

I don't know how I feel about the ending. I might read it again.

Is the inference of the barbecued baby that that band of survivors were deliberately getting their woman pregnant as a source of food? That's an awful, awful, frightening though, possibly the darkest thing I've ever read.

also not very efficient

think about it, that's liek 9 months for one meal.

I'm not gonna read any of this thread because it seemed to get all spoiler-ey from the get go, but my question is should I read this? I'm a-hungry for book right now I am.

how much meat on a newborn babby too? not worth it; you'd be better off eating the woman.

?

agreed, maybe she could produce another sprog -- but that's *another* nine months, and for a small yield. who has nine months?

I assumed it was someone else's baby, kidnapped to be et.

i read it as bred-specifically-for-eating, and had the same wonders about efficiency. also, i was worried at there being no mention of whether or not it was free range/organic.

^ above few posts pretty much explain problem with "barbecuing babies = horrific"

You wouldn't rely on bred-for-barbecue-baby as your sole source of food, but you would at least know that you had a guaranteed source of food every 7-9 months (I'm not imagining many would go full-term), while you scavenge what's available inbetween.

Fucking hell, how gruesome has this concept made me?

yeah but seriously, you'd have to feed the woman *and* the baby while she was pregnant -- it just doesn't add up.

yeah- eating the woman herself would probably be a much more efficient way of going about it

reading this now finally after letting it sit on my shelf for two years. it is a joy. reading this after having a child is a perfect mindfuck. oddly enough there were times over the past two years when I had to carry my son and he was way too heavy or fussy, or I've had to deal with him on very little sleep, etc, and to get myself through it I've imagined that we were in a post-apocalyptic world and that I would have to persevere despite his complaints or we would die, and it's made it bearable. also, having been a child of the 70's/early 80's, I often had nightmares of nuclear holocaust; my earliest, non-werewolf related nightmare had to do with some massive nuclear explosion.

"The Road" kind of makes me want to become a crazy ass survivalist and build a bomb shelter.

read it in one sitting, and i can definitely see the attraction, but that ending....?

-- darraghmac,

was it too happy for you?

yeah- i guess that it just seemed so unlikely, given the total breakdown in society we've been led through up til that point. i was waiting for someone to kill & eat the kid up until the final paragraph, if i'm honest.

i was waiting for someone to kill & eat the kid up until the final paragraph, if i'm honest.

(I said this upthread and it didn't go anywhere, but I've never been averse to redundancy.)

i dunno about this new cover, it's kinda lame

http://www.bookninja.com/wp-content/themes/bookninja/images/road.jpg

ergh. david cameron lookalike.

jesus that's just inappropriate.

loooool it reminds me of that mcsweeneys thing where they talked abt the movie version - 'in book, wife is dead. Rewrite this. Have her be alive and like blowjobs.'

Maybe wife doesn't like blowjobs—wife really likes blowjobs.

surely that cover is a wind-up?

lol trolled

x-post
uh yeah. do you really think today's parent is going to call the road 'heartwarming'/??

there is a baby on a spit in this book come on

http://www.bookninja.com/?p=4641