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Forget the movie, read this book
Book Review
By Derryll White
McCarthy, Cormac (2006). The Road.
Starting a new Cormac McCarthy novel is always both a treat and a challenge. His writing style is gifted and clear while still breaking rules of grammar and syntax and his erudition often leaves me feeling stilted and mundane. Nobody should be that talented and smart. For me, his work is the measure of what a writer should strive for.
From the opening paragraph the reader knows that an apocalyptic tale is being entered that will offer no escape and little comfort. But the rhythms and phrasings, from the very beginning remind the reader of biblical and liturgical cadences, of gods and images long gone. And as descriptive and wordy as McCarthy is, always there is the diamond of a succinct phrase that says everything: ‘each the other’s world entire.’
The question for me is, what do we believe in? Civility? Sharing? Rights? They all fall by the wayside when one is alone. What do we honour? Our parents? Our love? Our God? McCarthy projects that those disappear as well. In the end perhaps we are left with the innate belief of inherent goodness at some level.
Cormac McCarthy doesn’t bother going into why the world as we know it ends. It just does. I like that a lot. As a Zen Buddhist might say – It’s all in the journey! Forget the movie, read this book.
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Excerpts from the novel:
BONDS – He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
A CAUTION – He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, don’t you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
STABILITY – All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
HOW IT ENDS – The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled Among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
