The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 7 September 2007
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy has carved out for himself a brilliant career as an author who attends to the lonely significance of life and death in lonely landscapes. In this almost unremittingly bleak novel, he pares down all of civilization to two people, a man and his son, walking south along a road through the blasted landscape of North America years after some gigantic unnamed cataclysm (be it nuclear war or asteroid impact). The world is blowing away in the midst of some kind of nuclear winter, with a uniform deck of gray clouds, frequent cold rain, and a constant fall of corrosive gray ash. Plants and trees are dead. Animals and birds are only a memory. We don't know exactly what happened, only that the man and the boy are heading south in the hopes of surviving the bitter winter. In an element reminiscent of George Stewart's Earth Abides, McCarthy depicts a broken humanity living on the leftovers of civilization. What food anyone can find is scavenged and pillaged from the burnt-out hulks of houses and stores. Small bands of people wander the landscape, universally threatening to the man and boy. McCarthy depicts their sharp cruelty in brutal and frank prose. The boy is seen as food. The man is his only protector. While McCarthy depicts a vivid, plausible and haunting vision of a dying world, the key to his story is the intense devotion the man has to his son. This is his story of a sick and fragile father trying to protect his son from a most hostile world. He sees danger everywhere, and as a father, has a deep conflict between instilling hope and confidence in his son, and the despair and fear that surrounds them. Fear and caution rule the man's life. Despite that, and the incredibly dim prospects for the future, he works desperately to keep his son alive and to maintain his spirit. The book is deeply haunting and reminiscent, also, of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. McCarthy's spare prose is intensely descriptive and its images lasting and disturbing. His vigorous defense of humanity despite despair is well-crafted and has a realistic ring to it, even within an unreal landscape. A dark and compelling tale.
(For this book, McCarthy was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.)
Also by McCarthy: [All the Pretty Horses]