Apocalypse, the Reaper, and Cormac McCarthy

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As many of my peers will testify, I’m something of a grammatical perfectionist. I used to have something of a reputation for stopping people mid-sentence to correct their syntax; annoying I know, and I’m a lot less anal about it now, but I just couldn’t help myself – a product of my upbringing I’m certain. Murder the written word, and your fate was even worse. ‘There’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’ were huge points of contention for me, and if ‘your’ writing something for ‘you’re’ assignments, God help you! Don’t even get me started on text-speak...
But as I said, I’m a lot more lenient now. For Cormac McCarthy’s sake, this is probably a good thing. Had I opened The Road two or three years ago, it would have annoyed the hell out of me. Punctuation? Not exactly plentiful. Chapters? Fraid’ not. Half the time it takes the concentrative powers of a brain surgeon to follow who is even speaking, so confusing is the layout of the dialogue. I mean the man hasn’t even bothered to name his characters!
So it makes you wonder why it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction doesn’t it? Poor layout and abundant simple sentences hardly make for compelling literature…do they? As a rule of thumb I would have said not, but then again I’m hardly infallible. Because The Road is actually pretty damn good.
I say ‘pretty’. This book is very bleak; probably not one for Nan – think facing down a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a water pistol during a hosepipe ban. But if, like me, you’re not averted to a healthy dose of woeful desperation, then you can’t go wrong with this.
A mysterious event has decimated the earth and pretty much everything that lives. Those that have survived exist in one of two roles – the hunter and the hunted. Imagine yourself in the shoes of our principal protagonist: a man (who, along with his young son, remains unnamed throughout), forced to live out of a wonky shopping trolley on various scavenged goods, all the time fearing that the next person you meet will try and gnaw your legs off while you’re still alive. The very boots in which your are imagining yourself are falling apart for the lack of a decent cobbler, your wife – the mother of your child – is dead, and every five seconds said child is asking if everything’s going to be all right! Credit crunch not looking quite so bad now, is it?
McCarthy sends little respite their way, either. If it isn’t the terrifyingly human cannibals dogging their steps, it’s starvation, illness, or the myriad other horrors of this hideous post-apocalyptic world. When a glimmer of hope does shine through, you’re trained to stay on edge, never really allowing yourself to feel any relief – just as the father and son don’t either. Though the days are grim, the nights are grimmer still. The man is dogged by dreams of his former life, a life that is but a fairy tale to the boy (who was born after the earth-shattering event). Each dream drags him a little further down into his malaise, until you wonder why he bothers to carry on at all. Those last two bullets left in his pistol would start looking pretty inviting if I were him – why not end it?
But he can’t. You don’t want him to! Even when he just wants to give up; lay down and die you feel like screaming ‘no!’ at the book. McCarthy is a crafty fellow and no mistake. You need them to succeed, somehow, for you to have any faith left in humanity at all.
So not a happy one then, but as I said this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s terrifying, it’s chilling, and worst of real, it could be real – but by God is it compelling! The lack of visual breaks in the prose are a harsh barrier, not affording you a place to stop even if you need to. All this, and more, will annoy the hell out of the grammatical demon in your life, and the abject bleakness is certainly not for everyone. The Road has drawn criticism for its minimalist style, but ultimately it is a case of preference, and if you can stomach this desolate approach, I would heartily recommend this crushing read.