The Road

(By Cormac McCarthy, 2006)

[It is timely to comment on this book, as we read a report in The Weekend Australian newspaper (24/1/26) that Federal Treasurer, Dr. Jim Chalmers, planned to read it over the summer break. Appropriate, for a man under whose stewardship Australia, economically, feels like it is circling the drain.]

This dystopian, post-apocalyptic fable won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007, so we were duly warned. Evocative? Perhaps. Repetitious? Certainly. Dully and deliberately so. Fatuous? ‘Okay.’

Day after day – gray, ash, cold. Gather wood, light a fire, drink water, eat from cans, walk down a Road.

Night after night – black, cold. Wake and watch the (perpetually terrified) boy, wait for dawn.

The man and his son are some of the last survivors of some unspecified global catastrophe (and if you guess what that is correctly, you too can write a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel). Boy is something of a simp, although he’s only 8 – more of a burden than a reason to live, really.

The two meet others, and observe incidents one-by-one, like certain Netflix episodes. There are boring, in-depth descriptions, such as how to wrap blankets in a tarp, how to make a lamp, how to retrieve stuff from a boat, reminiscent of With Love, Meghan. McCarthy, of whom we are on record as not being fans, has obviously seen The Omega Man (1971), Mad Max (1979), Escape From New York (1981) and Edge of Darkness (1985), and lots of zombie films.

This should really have been reduced to a short story, one that goes something like this:

“We should go, Papa. Can we go? Yes. We can go. I’m scared. I know. I’m sorry.

It’s all right. We shouldn’t have come. You want to stop. I always want to stop.

We have to be more careful. I have to be more careful. I know. We’ll stop. Okay? Okay.

We just have to find a place. Okay.”

And that’s about it. Okay?

Oh alright, we can add the caravan with catamites, cellar people for dinner, a baby on a spit, food somehow being found untouched in houses that have been ransacked many times by ravenous hordes and so on and on. However, there is no ‘pay-off’ here, no point to this chronicle, the novel as reductio ad absurdum.