When Oprah speaks, everyone reads—or so the bookstores would have us think, with their gold “Oprah’s Bookclub” stickers and “Recommended Reading” lists. I usually avoid the frilled up, racked tables at the front of the store, but every now and then, something with the “Oprah’s Bookclub” sticker looks like it could be good. “The Road“, by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men), was one of those: a literary Mad Max according to those in the know. Now, it looks like The Road may even be coming to the big screen, with Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce (or maybe Viggo Mortensen).
McCarthy evokes a bleak, meaningless end to the world in this story set within the final whimper – fields of ash and snow, dead plants, the detritus of riots, fleeing refugees, and burning cities. The only other living things on the barren landscape are the cannibalistic groups, feeding off the weak and the dead.
The Road tells the tale of a boy and his father, traveling south to escape the hard winter that is falling in a world devastated by a nuclear war—or some other, unnamed apocalypse. (McCarthy never spells it out, but the landscapes read a lot like the nuclear winter scenario favored by many science fiction authors.) McCarthy evokes a bleak, meaningless end to the world in this story set within the final whimper – fields of ash and snow, dead plants, the detritus of riots, fleeing refugees, and burning cities. The only other living things on the barren landscape are the cannibalistic groups, feeding off the weak and the dead.
The father and son are never named. I realise that McCarthy probably has some sort of arty reason to do this, but in a book with only two major characters, both male, the over use of “he” and “his” makes for some unintelligible sentences. On top of this, McCarthy also eschews most punctuation—like the use of quotation marks to indicate dialogue. If this were the 19th Century with its difficult typesetting, or even an unabridged copy of a book from an era with difficult typesetting, okay, sure. But today, there really is no good reason to omit basic punctuation, and leaving it out makes dialogue between the father and son (and the extremely rare other characters) even harder to follow.
And the story itself? It progresses slowly and never really goes anywhere. The odd moments of excitement—like the father facing down an armed militia-man in the forest—are too quickly resolved, not to mention few and far between. There is essentially no tension, just a monotonous journey filled with seemingly silly choices (why abandon a bunker that is well hidden and stocked with heat and food supplies enough to last until the winter lifts to make the perilous journey to a haven that may not exist?) and deus ex machina resolutions.
Beside the stylistic problems that made this book a frustrating read, there are a number of plot problems – problems like the scale of the devastation not being consistent. If this is set a decade after a huge nuclear war, then the crops would have died ten years ago and the starvation and cannabilism would have happened earlier. If the nuclear war was small, then things should be slowly returning to “normal”. If there was some sort of “plant killing plague” then why are there still the remains of seemingly recently dead plants, and what were the fires that are seen in a flashback? It’s not even so much that the apocalypse was unrealistic – it’s more that the apocalyptic event is never explained, making the world hazy and undefined. If McCarthy had ever said what the apocalypse was, I could perhaps have suspended my disbelief—and I think I would have enjoyed the book more. Instead, we are left guessing, trying to analyze the “clues”, waiting for an explanation that never comes. Perhaps McCarthy thinks the world-changing event is too obvious to spell out – but it isn’t. Perhaps McCarthy thinks it doesn’t matter—but it does. True, the nature of the event isn’t important to the story in the sense that the father and son can do nothing about it, but it matters in terms of the created world and my place, as reader, in relation to that world.
[They] take the elements of science fiction seen as best, while most often omitting those which make good science fiction good.
So, I didn’t like this book—and I hope it wasn’t the Oprah factor that made me dislike it. I know I wanted to like it. Generally speaking, I want to like things that might help people discover the sort of things I like, a trait that often influences my choice of gifts and conversational topics. Unfortunately though, The Road, like The Handmaids Tale before it, suggests that “real”, “literary” authors cannot create consistent, believable science fiction (feel free to prove me wrong in the comments), instead trying to take the elements of science fiction seen as best, while most often omitting those which make good science fiction good.
