“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. It is the post-apocalyptic story of a father and his young son, struggling to survive in the aftermath of an unspecified calamity that has destroyed almost all life on Earth.
Like the tale it tells, the narrative style of this book hits you with its frank brutality. There are no names. Just ‘man’ or ‘boy’ or ‘old man’. (Presumably because this could be the story of any one of us). Furthermore, when characters speak, there is no flowery adornment of language. Every sentence is stripped away even of basic punctuation and quotation marks. Dialogues don’t even start with, then he said or, then she replied.
That raw telling is however only the voices of the survivors. When the narrator speaks, the sad beauty of this tragic story is presented in such poetic terms, it quite takes your breath away. “By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.” … “All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.” … “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.”
There is also a juxtaposition of events - in the narration of the present with memories of the past - a fishing trip with his uncle, a movie date with his girlfriend … splashes of colour seep through the alienating grey every now and then.
Every now and then also, a question is thrown at you, making you stop in your tracks and really wonder. “How does the never to be differ from what never was?” … “People are always getting ready for tomorrow but tomorrow isn’t getting ready for them.”
There is so much sadness in this terrifying reality. Those moments don’t just come from scenes of such obvious horror as seeing a man struck by lightening drag himself on and on till he at last sits down and never gets up, or seeing scores of people dying, stuck to melting tar. When the boy thinks he saw another boy and cries to go back and help him, or when the father has to leave him alone for a while and says, “I’ll be in the neighbourhood” and the boy asks, “Where is neighbourhood”; there are so many heartbreaking moments. Like the boy - a moral compass in a disintegrating world - who has to quickly learn many cruel lessons of survival (including how to kill himself with a gun), we too have to deal with the shock of being in a world where the fight for survival strips humans of all humanity and makes cannibals out of them.
As I recount my reactions to the story, I am reliving a great sorrow and a sheer terror, and it is not easy to form a cohesive review out of such brutality. The boy says at one point, some things, once they enter your head, never come out … I think this story about “the good guys who are carrying the fire” will continue to haunt me for a very long time.
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