Fiction: It is over. Nothing remains. Dead bodies, dead trees, an empty sky, a deserted landscape. A man wakes and reaches out to the sleeping child beside him. "Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.
Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world." The man and the boy, a father and son, are engaged not in an adventure but in some kind of odyssey of the damned. Their postmodernist journey into nothingness is presented as a quest, and the goal is to reach the coast before one or both of them dies.
The Road is Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel. It is intense, deliberate and unoriginal, a sustained, largely visual horror story delivered in a relentless monotone of bleak reportage. But this is the problem: it is relentless but never fully chilling, and exposes the mannered narrowness of McCarthy's style. The narrative oversees the furtive movements of two weary, frightened beings, with the focus on the father, whose sole motivation is to keep his child alive. He thinks it is October "but he wasn't sure. He hadn't kept a calendar for years". As the man watches the "ashen daylight congeal over the land", he realises "that the child was his warrant". The man then says, to no one: "If he is not the word of God God never spoke."
This is a difficult book to read, and one that is almost impossible to engage with, such is the tone of apocalyptic fervour. The language is ponderous and the tone is as flat and dead as the world through which the pair trudge. On one level, it is as if this is McCarthy's response to the events of September 11th, 2001. There is no doubt that his father and son, a symbolic pairing, a past and a future, are suspended in what is left of America. It is also obvious that this is no aftermath of a natural disaster, but a hell made by man. If there was a war, there was no winner. The prize itself was destroyed. McCarthy focuses on the results, and the evidence, a blasted devastation, suggests that the nuclear holocaust has finally happened.
Father and son exchange fragments of conversation. They attempt to reassure each other. It is all in the present; it is as if they have no shared past.
There is no reference to what has happened, no mention of the terrible event that has led them to this horror. The descriptions are repetitive; everything is dead, the buildings are abandoned. The father's desperation is palpable as he searches for food and tools, items of forgotten clothing, shoes, a dry blanket. Yet although their plight is appalling, and they exist in a state of constant fear of attack from an enemy that appears as intent on survival as they are, the narrative never develops into more than a litany intended to convey despair. It is a performance piece - McCarthy's vision of a possible, probable, hell - but far more shocking is the fact that it seems so familiar. Too many film- makers, from Gone With the Wind onwards, have already explored this aftermath theme, as has Margaret Atwood in her cynical futuristic yarn, Oryx and Crake (2003), which was, at times, very funny.
Humour, however, is not the earnest, dogged McCarthy's strong point. He favours dark pronouncements delivered by ragged prose laden with gravitas and menace:
On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadowlands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a road works lay abandoned.
It is as if McCarthy is constantly preparing the scene for the action that never fully begins. Instead the characters, man and boy, and some walk-on lost souls, wander on.
JOURNEYS DOMINATE MCCARTHY'S work. When the British edition of his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, was published in 1989, some four years after the US publication, he was hailed as a new breed, a chronicler of the American west interested in the savagery, not the romance. He made the territory of the Texas/Mexico borderlands his own. There were no heroes, no dreamers. All The Pretty Horses (1992) is set in the mid-20th century and reworks the quest theme of Blood Meridian as a love story about one boy's dream of becoming a cowboy. That narrative also had McCarthy's characteristic violence, but it was far less relentless.
With The Crossing (1994), McCarthy's finest work to date, his heavy, near-biblical prose and lushly imagined landscape captured the soul of the American west. It was the second volume of his Border Trilogy, which was to collapse into the stagy melodrama of The Cities of the Plain (1999).
No Country for Old Men, a Tex-Mex thriller of sorts, was published a year ago. Alongside the violence and a plot pivoting on a beleaguered character's attempts to hide the stolen cash he has found, are old Sheriff Bell's interludes of folksy self-discovery. It was a disappointing novel, but also a despairing one.
Now comes The Road, equally black, if infused by the mutual love of the man and his child. The end is inevitable from the opening pages. The father duly explores a number of abandoned houses along the way - some are empty, others are rich in supplies, one is a veritable storehouse, and there are the discoveries of dead bodies, the living dead, a charred, headless infant burning on a spit. McCarthy, lamenting his fallen country, leaves no horror unwritten or under-described, but ultimately this forlorn postmodern pilgrim's progress is as empty as the landscape which eventually opens on to a deserted coast - and perhaps that is his point.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Road By Cormac McCarthy Picador, 241pp, £16.99
