*The Road

The Road -Cormac McCarthy
The Road is not a transcendent novel. It is not philosophy, fact, nor harbinger. It is not a moral or a prophesy. It is an artifact.
Could you say that a recovered amphora is transcendent?
But what relic has function?
If an amphora could tell a story then why would men tell stories?
Then what does the amphora do?
It promises.
And so does this book.
It promises of civilization. Of life. And of God.
“Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. [to his son] Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”

Again, read an entire McCarthy novel in less than 24 hours. Again, sick. Again, what is the opposite of devastation?
The book started with the typical Cormac off-colored descriptions…“like some… [simile of something godly, ghastly or obscure].” And the dialogue was spitting off the skillet.
But a few times Cormac was off target with sentences like, “A blackness to hurt your ears,” which is, itself, painful, beautiful, but McCarthy stresses the prose a little too much, and adds, “with listening,” [A blackness to hurt your ears with listening] which is obvious, redundant, and, in the author’s own standards, long-winded.
“Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.”
The truncated, perhaps often truncheoned, diction of The Road was less abrasive and simpler, almost sweet, inquisitive, than what is found in even the most recent of his novels.
“On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?”

And as the reviewer in The Economist pointed out, we are not short of the Cormacian stylism, “The snow fell nor did it cease to fall.” But sometimes he broke out of his fashion and was dead on good, “The nights were blinding cold and casket black…” and, this cold, miniature, Melvillian chapter, addressing the reader, pointblank, “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.”
This sentiment is perhaps the completion of an oeuvre. But despite the blood splattered, the insanity, and the fear of ten novels, a play and a screenplay, in both of his septuagenarian works we are left with a modicum of hope. Of promise. The finish of No Country was the story of a man who built a stone water trough that would last ten thousand years. Did it last the cataclysm that forced father and son to take to The Road? Probably. Just like the promise of the amphora will last.

And in The Road the author’s voice never felt as obvious as in moments when the writing itself was choked:
“When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.”
and
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”