Excessive Candour
End of the Road

The central riddle of The Road is God. The landscape itself will be familiar to readers of stories about America After the Rain, the kind of story that has been told about America since The Scarlet Plague (1915) by Jack London, or earlier. Nor will there be any surprises in discovering the specific nature of the holocaust that has doomed the world this time round, several years before the tale itself begins: so familiar is the iconography of nuclear winter that Cormac McCarthy doesn't even need to say Bomb.

As surely as we recognized the shape of the world to come in the instant of the fall of the Twin Towers, we recognize the ash-choked rain that falls almost constantly from skies black at noon upon two familiar figures: the man and the boy at the heart of The Road, trekking southward out of frozen half-mountains downhill toward what may be the Gulf of Mexico.

Though no matter if it is in fact the Gulf, or a greater ocean also dead: for there are no names left, nor faces. McCarthy mentions this only occasionally, but it is perfectly clear that the man and the boy, who are no more given names than the body of water they seek, must mask their faces throughout against the deathly ash that continues to sift downward into the earth, coating trees, filling old marks of the plough.

From any perspective but the soul's, they are faceless, nothing but eyeholes: walking fenceposts, a stick man and a stick boy following the Road south: The Wizard of Oz by Samuel Beckett. (In her F&SF review, Elizabeth Hand mentions not only Beckett but Ernest Hemingway: this petrified wood is full of noises.) Any secular reading of The Road would tend to suggest that McCarthy's intention is clear: to write an end-of-the-world story with no escape hatch: no blade of grass. There is no riddle here.

But the boy radiates light.

This may not, in fact, be much of a riddle for many Americans, who more than readers like myself are likely to recognize biblical cadences and concordances in an American text, whether or not it's explicitly apocalyptic, whether or not it's explicitly stripped to that bare ground in which the essence of God may be sounded. This linguistic and typological ground bass is far less commonly found in European or English novels: but when the accelerator is floored in an American book, you can generally smell Bible. So what may be clear to an American reader, but was not clear to me until the last couple dozen pages, is that McCarthy wishes to convey some sense that the radiance emitted by the boy—it is a radiance that his father literally witnesses near the end of things—may mark something more than mundane.

Taking up a burden, putting it down

There are clues, for those better than I at this sort of thing. The boy is born after the Bomb has fallen; his mother commits suicide, but he remains pure of heart; we are meant (I think) to note as something rich and strange his spiritual desolation at any cruelty to other survivors the man his father may be forced to commit in order to keep them alive; we are meant to understand that his ability to read and play the flute may be preternatural; we are meant to understand typologically the brief scenes with the only named character in the book, an ancient man called Ely (that is, Elijah), whom the boy feeds on the road; and when we approach the end of things—certainly the end of the father's life—we should be well attuned to hear a music of biblical typology when the boy begs his father to help a starving man who had stolen from them.

McCarthy does not use quote marks, so that everything said and thought and described (as in the quote below) seems carved out of the same stone; the frequent sentence fragments are like streaks in the stone that cannot shift, they are ineradicable:

He's gone [the father says]. Come on.

He's not gone, the boy said. He looked up. His face streaked with soot. He's not.

What do you want to do?

Just help him, Papa. Just help him. ...

The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared.

The boy didn't answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.

You're not the one who has to worry about everything [says the father].

The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

But it is too late for the man, and perhaps for the planet that we know. He cannot truly hear the boy—though it is clear, I think, that we are meant to, meant to understand that something like a Christ figure is taking up its burden.

A day or so later of trekking and stopping and trekking and stopping—all of which takes only a page to convey, via the hauntedly fluid narrative caesuras McCarthy seems to have a pure genius at creating—the man walks alone into the road:

The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? ... The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. ... He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt. [P220]

Much of the language of The Road (as Hand says) has something like the bone simplicity of Hemingway before he lost it, and it is in a way something of a cheat to give readers the highly enriched agitprop for epiphany that I've just quoted from here, without making it very clear that McCarthy's lifts into this language are as apparently effortless—and as deeply earned—as the seamless caesuras that make this unutterably bleak tale seem almost breathless to reach its end.

So: the power of the passage above derives in part from its insertion—multi-veined and igneous—into the flat sedimentary speed of what precedes it.

In the beginning was the word

We need to focus on a single word. Salitter—which means something like the divine substance of God as expressed through the entities of the world: God-salt within the stone—is a term way beyond most readers' recognition vocabulary.

It seems to have originated with the mediaeval theologian Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), and to have pretty well stuck there. It would be presumptuous to claim that this exceedingly obscure word comprises the essence of what McCarthy means to convey in The Road: but if his Christ figure, in whose presence I only half-believe any way, is meant to shape our gaze beyond all the evidence the text provides of utter termination of all hope, then that Christ figure must somehow be seen—be felt—to transcend the drying of the divine out of the earth.

At best, therefore, I think that any continuance of the child who is the one, into the world beyond the closing of the text, is moot.

And this is as it should be, I think. The Road may remotely resemble earlier American SF post-catastophe tales by George R Stewart, whose Earth Abides (1949) is inescapably recessional, or Ward Moore or even Gordon R. Dickson, whose Wolf and Iron (1990) is surprisingly solitudinous for much of its length; but it is like these stories burned down to the nub.

At its very rawest—as the man and the boy are reduced to near-skeletons clawing through a landscape that is absolutely lifeless—The Road is the story we have none of us wanted to tell or read about the end of the world. It is the story of what we have done to the planet that we did not want to have to read. It is a story I for one find it impossible to think of as being redeemed by a Christ. It is the story about the end of the world in which the world ends.