Cormac McCarthy- The Road

well then off the top of my head i can name about twenty better postapocalyptic genre pieces

Define "better".

I mean, that's a really arrogant statement, and even after you've named these twenty superior pieces, any one of us might disagree.

arrogant? you said it was "the most perfect fable of the 20th century". any one of us might disagree.

OK, i "might" be able to name 20 postapocalyptic novels which "might" be better.

Then name them. Wtf have you been waiting for, an advocate? It might even be interesting. (As long as you define "better", obv.)

Back on track, McCarthy was a lot more cheery/positive on Oprah than I ever thought/imagined he'd be.

Then name them. Wtf have you been waiting for, an advocate? It might even be interesting. (As long as you define "better", obv.)

Not that Moonship should expect any kind of response, if the reaction to my own list is any indication. Ah well.

i really appreciate your list, james. thanks! i was just going over it yesterday. this definitely sounds like something i would love:

"#Ian Macpherson: Wild Harbour – a married couple try to stay alive and unnoticed in Highland Scotland as the world falls to pieces through war"

It's a good one - Canongate (the Scottish publisher) have it in print, if that helps track it down.

i thought this was breathtaking. could hardly finish the last few pages through tears.

i bought this. because the bookshops are all attempting to flog it at half price.

i also got three jim thompsons for a fiver and 'maximum city' for half price. and bob dylan's autobio and what happened to the purchases thread anyway

cute: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0730,idea,77350,9.html

i finally read the road, while on vacation. a cheery little beach read. i liked it, despite or because of the relentless repetitiveness of it (find food, travel, almost starve, get in some kind of confrontation, repeat), which includes the language (i'd like to see a word count on use of "gray," "ash", "black" and "cold"). i liked how he stripped down his verbiage but still managed to work in his wacky vocabulary ("crozzled"!).

but so basically, it's just a story about a parent coming to terms with the fear/knowledge that he will die and leave his child behind. alice munro could tell that story in 25 pages and it would probably be better even though it would all take place in the backyard or on a trip to the grocery store or whatever. this being cormac, though, it has to be freighted with the doom of the world. but he has a lot of fun with the landscapes, and the father-son dialogue is pretty good. sweet, even. it's easily the sweetest mccarthy book i've read, which would have been betrayed if the ending had been more bleak.

i loved this book and i think the stripped down,minimalistic story-telling fable is the best form for mccarthy to write in.
compared to "blindness" by saramago (which is kinda overrated, imo), it is much better.BUT, mccarthy,as always, is better in moving the plot forward,making a great,page turning adventure story (david lynch should direct the movie adaptation in "the straight story" style!), and far less good in digging deep into the depths of the characters,and the moral questions the novel arises.
one can say it fits mccarthy's style and perspective, and it might be true, at least in this form of writing, like "the old man and the sea" did for hemmingway.
but i think, in the "going forward" vs. "digging deep" fight, the first one wins,and when that happens in a book,the same happens with the reader: you go forward with it,but it doesnt reach deep into your soul and mind,like the best books in the world do.

still,i enjoyed it very much.it's a sort of a bible style tale,only with a modern american approach.and much more accesible because of that.

you can say the boy and the child can be read as one character:
in every person theres a struggle between hope,wheich is less realistic, but keeps us alive (the boy) and the realism, which leads to despair sometimes (the fatehr)
SPOILER:
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when the father dies, cause he realise they are at the end of the road, and the hope for a better future is more than questionable, the boy takes his place, and,yeah, like in hollywood, hope wins after all.
but the boy,of course, learned a lot from his father, and now he is a "complete man": he has hope, but he also holds the gun,and he is much less affraid.so the combination between hope and realism is now perfect.

(and as mccarthy said to oprah,love is important)

if the boy or the father would travell alone in the road on their own,cause hope cannt exist alone,nor pure realism,so they feed one another with their believs.

an irish guy came up to me and told me i should read this the other day.

'it's so dark.' he said. 'you can feel the cold.'

i read it in one sitting - absorbing doesnt really do it justice.

I came to the conclusion that the catastrophe was most likely natural, probably a supervolcano. I don't see much evidence that it was nuclear. There's no radiation sickness, little suggestion that there was ever any form of government (just the road itself really) let alone one that brought on this calamity, and the damage isn't localised. There's also just too much ash and darkness. The screaming corpses in the tarmac are harrowing, but made me think more of Pompei than Hiroshima.

I've seen it described (in the UK) as the first great climate change novel. I'm sure it's not about that.

the question is: is it importand?

Not to the characters - it could've been Godzilla for all they can do about it. I think it does matter a bit. The human-human struggles are at such an puny, intimate level that it would be odd if the overlying cataclysm was also a result of human agency. Better to leave it to god or fate or whatever. Certainly I don't like the idea that it's a warning of what might happen if we keep nuclear weapons/don't recycle/insert cause of choice.

I was watching ER last week, and one dude's son comes home from college and gives him a copy of The Road for his birthday. He's all, "No, dad, it's not just good, it's a whole new way of thinking." lolz

yeah, the book is at least a little overrated

It's quite clear from the text that it's the result of a massive nuclear war. As for there being no radiation sickness, it very much seems to me as though there is. Nuclear winter is climate change, I guess, but that's not what it's about. And if you want the "first great climate change novel", look to Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Forty Signs of Rain', etc.

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.