Your liquid stare...

This is a book that is gaining some neat media parceling at the moment, and so I thought I would wedge myself in with some ship's biscuit and Tizer before the inevitable smug re-releases and populist nonsense that accompanies such things begin to blow like a foul wind. I need to tell you, despite being about apocalypse, loss, cannibalism, rape and murder, how heart-achingly beautiful this book is. It is a story where America has been seared by bubbling heat, and left to crumble into anonymous and cloying ash, but it is the most nascent, human thing I have read all year. And for the most part, there are only two humans in it. No names, there isn't any need. They are just The Man, and The Boy. This is what the spectrum of humanity has been reduced to. A wasted, depleted set of ruins, crawling towards a dead sea.



When asked where his ideas for this book had come from, McCarthy, author of the Border Trilogy and the similarly austere, bleak No Country For Old Men, simply said that he had been visiting El Paso in Texas and imagined it on fire. He had been with his son, and perhaps in some subconcious ache of fatherhood he dedicated the book to him. This dedication leaks from the book at every page. The Boy is the fragile, terrified heart of this book, and though much of the action and exposition comes from the mind and mouth of The Man, so much of its focus, its drive, comes from the youth himself. The Boy is the conclusion, the goal and the only care for The Man, and every action, every thought, is tautened by his concern for and protection of his son. Even in the wasteland that they traverse, we are entirely sucked into their story, and will them on to whatever pointless objective they seek.

And it is pointless. The entire book and plot is pointless. At every turn we see that America, and perhaps the whole world, is devoid of life. The ubiquitous and never-ending ash coats everything, poisons the water and soil, and masks the sky. The bitter cold and their hunger permeates everything they do, and a hushed blanket is settled on the landscape. Every noise that they do not make is treated with caution. And well it should be; almost every other human on the earth seems to have devolved, losing their grip on love and basic humanity and their own minds until we see them, Orcish and hunched, thumping their way along the Road, the only landscape worth mentioning, dragging their pregnant women like great sows, children and mothers brought for sex and food. At one point the two main characters descend into an old manor to find a larder of pale, emaciated humans, struggling to the light, trying to escape a fate that will never let them go. It is these unspeakable horrifics that pepper the book and point to the utter mind-boggling brutality of this new world, one that The Man and The Boy run from with every last atom of strength.



McCarthy's language and style, here, its sparseness and its beauty, are allowed to move freely with the two travellers. It is at times desperately clinical, as if the actions, the everyday medium of survival, can only be shown what it is, and at others slipping into a fevered heartland of blackness, myth and guilt, The Man remembering fragments of the world that went before him, his dead wife, and the beauty that existed. These snippets, sometimes preceded by a building Dreamtime as night settles and The Boy falls asleep, at others sneaking up as he surveys a crashed car, a corpse in a bed, or a can of beans, remove us suddenly from the world of silent survival and into the true world of literature, that of introspection and true poetry. The Man says these things because they are true, not because they are pretty.

And so it goes. The two travel the Road, and we share their miniscule triumphs, a cache of clean water, a can of beans, a comb, a freezing bath in the ruined ribs of a house. The Road, the title, the goal of the book, the coast that The Man speaks of, is irrelevant, as he knows it is - there will be nothing there, just sky, and sea, and more ash. This is a character study, the last two people that matter on Earth. This is The Man, and The Boy. It is a truly beautiful, awful story.