The Other Side of Paradise

By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Friday, January 12, 2007

BOOK REVIEW

The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 2006

“she said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.”
-an unnamed woman, The Road.

American novelist Cormac McCarthy stands out not only from the crowded field of pedantic fiction writers who, thanks to literary theory, no longer write to the public at large but to fuddy-duddy professors, but also from the novelist-check-cashers of the Stephen King and James Patterson variety. In his deeply penetrating new work, The Road, Cormac McCarthy is covering the ground of a post-apocalyptic world reduced to ashes by the evil that men do.

We, the readers, are escorted into nuclear winter through the exploits of a middle aged man and his 10-year-old son, neither owning up to, nor owning a name. Father and son—two of the last humans on earth—are reluctant tourists on the road to nowhere; from one desolate town to the next they struggle to find the basic staples of life. Ultimately, in such a cold world they seek a change in weather: the presumptuous warmth of the southern shore. But even upon arrival there they find only a frigid beach, hardened gray with icy wind swept water. In his novel, McCarthy only vaguely cites the cause of this catastrophe as gargantuan wars, but beyond this he demurs; mystery shrouds the wasteland of The Road’s apocalypse.

This is a traditional story erected on a traditional theme: the struggle for the good in a world broken by evil. Yet, McCarthy follows Ezra Pound’s dictum to “make it new”—McCarthy’s vision is deeply metaphysical, yet unlike most modern smart guys, McCarthy’s vulnerability, his humility, even admits that he too, like his fellow pilgrims, does not know so much as to know it all. In greater worlds, solutions and resolutions melt harmonically, but not in this cacophonic inferno. And the pilgrims—the little boy may even be a prophet among them—begin their wretched journey in the inferno, only to be given a glimpse of paradise, like their predecessor Moses, by novel’s end.

It certainly requires a measured audacity, if not arrogance, to try to improve upon a form as conquered as this, by authors who have already occupied their seats in the firmament of the Western Canon. In moral order, McCarthy’s transcendent predecessors include the likes of Dante, and even the mundane Orwell; in prose, McCarthy has departed from his characteristically Faulknerian mellifluence for a clean and pointed Hemingway—but a mystical Hemingway at that, a Hemingway compounded by Conrad. McCarthy is re-addressing the deepest of moral predicaments, and the answers, as is often the case, escape the question almost as if the question were never offered a chance.

In this world of total evil, the presence of beauty and goodness, even to a dullard, is a miracle—yet it is precisely these two forces that sustain these two very good and interesting travelers. In this, only the love that binds the father and son together sparkles and shines in the midst of this apocalypse: the father explains, “all things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.” The miracle of goodness is here explained by the mystery of creation, an unsatisfying if not unsettling answer—a leap of faith, not reason, is required to work out McCarthy’s creation. This is, therefore, no sure bet.

The man constantly reminds the morally naïve—and therefore uncorrupted or pre-corrupted—child that they are the presumptive “good guys” in a world wrenched by the evil of the “bad guys.” At a higher level, the struggle for life is transcended by the parallel struggle for goodness and beauty, virtues that are pristine and remain remnant within the little boy, and only guardedly in the father.

The father reassures the child that it is his duty and his reason for being to protect him: “I was appointed by God” to do that, he explains. The struggle for life, however, requires the father to operate within the demonic moral framework that typifies a world broken by corrupted souls: the father heatedly murders a fellow traveler who snatched the little boy, prepared to kill the child for food. The son, in his naïveté, is ill-prepared for such cruelty; he recedes into a preternatural silence, quieted by the horror of life, death, murder and destruction.

At stake is life itself, and the scarcity of food and shelter has led to a savage, some would say ‘Darwinian’, moral system, that finds its conclusion in torture and cannibalism for nearly all those living but the father and son. When the father and son come upon a cellar in an abandoned house, the hope for hidden food impels the father to pry open the locked door. Instead, to their horror they find: “huddled against the back wall… naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hips and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous…then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.” Here, Homo Sapiens is mere flesh to be eaten, lacking the virtues that separate humane man from inhumane beast. The man grabs his son and flees with his life. Once they have reached a safer haven, the man reestablishes—albeit in a small way—the moral order of the chaotic world they inhabit. The son begins:

We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not.
Even if we were starving?
We’re starving now.
You said we weren’t.
I said we weren’t dying. I didn’t say we weren’t starving.
But we wouldn’t.
No. We wouldn’t.
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys.
Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire.
And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.
Okay.

The motif of “carrying the fire” is introduced in this exchange, a motif to which McCarthy will return again and again in the novel, to contrast the pitiless darkness and icy-fingered world of The Road with a heart that pulses with the fire of goodness: a light shining through the darkness.

Though they are riding rough-shod over a road to nowhere, the deeper path they struggle to walk, like St. John, is the one that ends at the end, in the presence of God, inasmuch as God is the locus of complete goodness and beauty, since man is clearly not. Or, as is the case in the novel, goodness and beauty are God manifest.

Unable to divine the nature of his son’s angelic goodness, the father cries out to the heavens with righteous skepticism, only to have it all extinguished in a slight whisper: “Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? Are you there? ...Will I see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.”

Though the father strives to attain this absolute reality represented by the sacred and profound, the boy is already there, and the reader learns that the fire is present within him. In perhaps the most stunning moment of the book, the child reveals his secret to the physically broken and spiritually desperate man: “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything,” the weathered father explains. And then the 10-year-old son, who is the incarnation of compassion, responds, “Yes I am. I am the one.”

Dying on the shore, the father’s last conversation with his son resolves the search for goodness, and gives away the essence of McCarthy’s novel. The father is easing his son’s touching concern for a lost boy they encountered on the road earlier in the novel.

Do you remember that little boy, Papa?
Yes. I remember him.
Do you think that he’s all right that little boy?
Oh yes. I think he’s all right.
Do you think he was lost.
No. I don’t think he was lost.
I’m scared that he was lost.
I think he’s all right.
But who will find him if he’s lost. Who will find the little boy?
Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.

This conversation is deeply moving. While they are talking about the little boy, they are also talking about any traveler on any road—from the little boy, to the son, to the father, to the reader. Set against the evil, death, and emptiness of the barren desert they travel, McCarthy finds and offers the hope for goodness. Indeed, the son himself is such hope. One of the mysteries—indeed, miracles—of The Road is how (why?) such a perfectly good child was created from the ashes and dust of such a horrifying world. The reader may return to the beginning of the novel, in one of the first statements the father makes about his little boy, to find the answer: “if he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

On McCarthy’s Road, God speaks—the mystery is explained, and there are voices here to be sure. The attentive reader may even hear them.

When the boy wakes to find his father dead, he holds his cold and stiff hand, repeating his father’s name—a name unknown to the reader—over and over again. There is an irony resonating throughout this: the first and last word spoken to a human being is his name, a name left unknown to the reader who strains to hear. McCarthy’s literary device points up to the enigma of beginnings and endings, and illuminates the sanctity of the spoken word, the sanctity of translating the grace of Spirit into the vulgate of human language, and then back again into the grace of art through beauty. And McCarthy’s translation is as flawless as post-fallen human’s can be (if we take him on his moral terms and not necessarily our own).

The very last words of the novel glow with that touch of paradise mentioned earlier in this review, the ecstatic potential of an Eden before the fall followed by mankind’s tragedy of losing it all: “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

Macabre and luminous is the aesthetic order that renders The Road one of the most revelatory works of literature published this year. A near perfect creation: its achievement lies in rousing the reader’s soul, conscience, and heart by asking the questions that most people are loathe to ask or even hear—too afraid to be left alone with, as Chesterton would say.

Given McCarthy’s tortured vision, failure to emulate the boy affirms the demonic consequences of a wayward humanity—a humanity straying evermore from its empyreal path. As the reader moves along to The Road’s moral cadence, he finds his own vermiculate road that ascends to at least purgatory, if not paradise. And for those who do not read McCarthy’s novel? To hell with them? Well, the gate is narrow as they say.

The Other Side of Paradise

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