. Spinning .

There’s a change happening within the characters–as well there should be, according to fiction "law"; but who’dve thought that McCarthy would abide?

Showing, via the dialogue, that as the man becomes more unsure of their fate, the boy, still frightened, begins to offer suggestions.  The father begins to ask for his opinion.  Mutual dependency develops as the boy becomes better as a lookout, a scout.  Even his quiet acquiescent Okay becomes firmer.  You can just tell and you start reading the same word differently as its meaning changes.

And what does this mean:

I think maybe they are watching, he (the man) said.  They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back.  (p. 177)

Here then, is the antithesis of beauty in the beauty of words:

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.  Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.  (p. 152)

These two sentences are typical McCarthy.  They also follow a sentence that has been often quoted in reviews; one which reveals a bit more of the state of the world.  But I am looking at words here.  Words that are carefully chosen and strung together to give more than their definitive meaning to the story.  The long sentence structure differs from the majority of the aforegoing text.  This seems to bring a mood of hopelessness as the landscape takes on the structure of a never-ending plane.

It’s all the same, McCarthy is telling us; it won’t get better.  The coastline is just as ravaged as the interior land.

McCarthy has a way of keeping things from us that he doesn’t think we need to know, that may shift focus away from the moment.  Then again, he has a tremendously subtle way of saying something that we might have missed if we’re unused to him:

The boy nodded.  He sat looking at the map.  The man watched him.  He thought he knew what that was about.  He’ pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town where he lived.  Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory.  Themselves among others, everything in its place.  Justified in the world.  Come on, he said.  We should go. (p. 153)

The difference defined:  stability, the known, the safety of home versus the movement of We should go.

McCarthy loves to throw out a question of ethics and leave the reader to decipher for himself beyond the character to go inside one’s own head.  He weaves it throughout this book as well, never letting us forget that we must go through the pages just as the stages of this journey with the big one hanging over us:  If it comes down to it, will he kill his son?

Backtracking a bit, we get the picture clearly of what the man has taught his son because of the kind of world they live in:

Don’t be afraid, he said.  If they find you you are going to have to do it.  Do you understand?  Shh.  No crying.  do you hear me?  You know how to do it.  You put it in your mouth and point it up.  Do it quick and hard.  Do you understand?  Stop crying.  Do you understand?  (p. 95)

But the man finds that the boy is terrified, too terrified to trust to do what he’s been told. 

Even as, later on, when they stumble into a well-stocked underground shelter, we already know that the danger hasn’t gone away; that the reality of the plan and the possibility of the need to kill themselves will not go away.  Maybe, we keep hoping, maybe the whole world isn’t like this.  But we know that hope is just that, hope.

So when does the love between them that has managed to overcome what I believe–and likely McCarthy as well–to be man’s instinct for personal survival over caring for others become an act of killing for the sake of love?  What is the transitional thought process?  It’s got to be more than not wanting someone you love to suffer.  It’s a total reversal of love’s intent.

Something clicked as I realized I’m at the halfway point in this book.  The sparseness of words, the white space, the dialogue, the emptiness of the visual text that matches the landscape of McCarthy’s world.

No Country for Old Men wasn’t up to Suttree or Blood Meridian, and I even photographed the book during my reading and postings. It was untraditional McCarthy, I felt.  Seen just in the arrangement of words into narrative structure.  Maybe it was a hint of what was to come in The Road.  But in this book, it’s vital to the setting, matching the story in its expanse of space.  Something’s missing from the pages just as it’s missing in a desolate world.

Not merely a vision of a possible future, a warning of sorts, but a vision of man’s nature comes from this story, and it’s not the nature of man that enabled this mess, but rather what occurs later, in McCarthy’s devastated world many years after the event that destroyed it.

What disturbs me the most is that while I can well imagine a fight for survival, a binge of looting, helping each other, clustering into compact groups as an aftermath, I would have guessed that eventually a drive to rebuild would come about.

This may in fact be impossible in McCarthy’s world, perhaps a place where nothing will grow and if food cannot be planted and harvested, then it would indeed come to this.  But it would seem to me that enough is left standing to have somehow gotten around the problem.  Hydraponic gardening?  Deep digging?  Animal husbandry?  When the man found dried up apples (not decomposed?) he ate them seeds and all.  My first thought was no–save the seeds to plant!

McCarthy doesn’t tell us what happened after the blast that wrecked the world, but it appears that the event was not the killing blow, but rather, what came after.

McCarthy has given a lot of thought to creating this world, and the greyness of it that he so repeatedly and rather singlely described it as is truly all it is. 

He hits us below the belt with the simple journey of the man and the boy.  Our fears are of the unknown, the grey dust of nightmares in which we come upon monsters.  But it is the known that offers the real danger, and maybe this is the message.  The few people, the few houses, the road itself are to be feared; in the dark woods there is safety.  McCarthy has reversed what we feel we can trust.

That, as I’ve learned from experience, is the worst fear of all.

What he gives us as the only enduring trait among men turned cannibalistic is a father’s love for his son.  The child holds onto a mere shred of trust in his father; he has come to question his decisions, has come to develop his own instincts for survival yet has a child’s easy acceptance of the ultimate outcome.  He hopes rather than trusts that his father can keep them from death. 

Just as I am getting into Francine Prose’s section on the "beautiful" sentence, what better place to be than in a McCarthy novel?

Prose states: 

The well-made sentence transcends time and genre.  A beautiful sentence is a beautiful sentence, regardless of when it was written, or whether it appears in a play or a magazine article.  (p. 36)

And here’s McCarthy:

He’d carried his billfold about till it wore a cornershaped hole in his trousers.  Then one day he sat  by the roadside and took it out and went through the contents.  Some money, credit cards.  His driver’s license.  A picture of his wife.  He spread everything out on the blacktop.  Like gaming cards.  He pitched the sweatblackened piece of leather into the woods and sat holding the photograph.  Then he laid it down on the road also and then he stood and they went on.  (p. 43)

A brevity of language, delivered in short, clipped, grammatically incorrect incomplete sentences.  But the hopelessness, the almost breathlessness of the staccato structure instead of making it a single long sentence or two is planned.  By the time we get to the final moment of his brief action and reflection, we are with the character, in his head, feeling lost and turning our backs on all we’ve known. 

As you all know, I’m a big McCarthy fan but maybe I’m getting a bit persnickety about his writing.  At his best, he is absolutely awesome.  At his worst, he’s still in the top 5%.  But in this novel, while his forte is creating the environment, even I am starting to get tired of the repetitious greyness of ash and blackness of the landscape. 

Another bothersome issue is the timeline as presented.  We catch on pretty quick that what happened is likely the result of an atomic bomb, we are also given information that it happened years ago.  Why are there still fires?  Why, in this barren landscape is there still wood for a campfire?  Why did he wait so long–years?–to start on the journey with his son? 

I’m just at the point where there are bits of flashback to the day it all went down, so maybe some of my questions will be answered.  But in the meantime, I’m questioning the character’s choices.

McCarthy does give us more insight than usual into his characters; the tenderness of the father’s concern for his son, the feelings towards his late wife, the hardness with which he deals with the one traveler they’ve met, and the son’s mature acceptance of their situation; his quiet "Okay." 

Nice, nice and powerful.  Terribly moving and allowing enough action and conflict to add interest to their plodding ordeal.

McCarthy opens this book with one new, one oft-used technique of his here: movement. 

A boy is sleeping, his father reaches out and touches him.  This is unusual tenderness from McCarthy or his characters.   Amid the greyness of a barren dawn, the bond between the two is thus established from page one.

But they are on a journey, waking up after spending a night alongside a desolate road that still hints of danger, hinted at by both the father’s nightmare and his binocular viewing of the morning.  In several other books, there is a road, or a path, a boat, a walk, a gypsy caravan. 

Movement, motion; McCarthy’s promise to take us from here to there despite the scenery painted a gloom of grey.

It’s off the shelf and on the coffee table:  Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I deserve it.