When our civilization ends, be it with a bang or a whimper, what will follow? The prospect of a post-apocalyptic wasteland ought to be fertile ground for any writer, but very few memorable works have sprung up from its craters: Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, and a handful of science fiction classics by the likes of Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury.
There certainly has been no shortage of movies on the subject, from masterpieces like Mad Max and Planet of the Apes to mercifully forgotten dross like Def-Con 4 and Hell Comes to Frogtown—in which the professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper must save humanity by rescuing the last fertile women from mutant amphibians. Perhaps there is something so unthinkable about the decline and fall of human empire that it tends to inspire the merely lurid or ridiculous. But it isn’t unthinkable—not any longer, not with suitcase nukes waiting in the trunk of the Hidden Imam’s welcome wagon. It won’t be long before the real “day after” gains an insistent grip on the imaginations of our best creators.
Cormac McCarthy should be just the right Virgil for a tour of this Last Judgment. At a time when many writers bury their heads in sands of frivolity and childish fantasy, he retains the understanding that we live in a postlapsarian world, peopled with violent, unpredictable creatures. His previous book, No Country for Old Men, was not good, but it was admirable in its intent, to show that, as I once heard it chillingly phrased, “evil is real, and evil walks this earth like a natural man.” Child of God, a stranger and more thoughtful monster’s-eye-view meditation on the problem of evil, is highly recommended, as is his classic Blood Meridian.
But McCarthy’s latest effort, The Road, is a missed opportunity. It tracks the movements of a father and young son through the scorched ash-heap that’s left of the United States. Why a father and son? To allow McCarthy to show us, as some ink-stained wretch doubtless will put it, the indomitable power of love in the face of even the most tragic and trying . . .
Yes, but that’s something that many of us take for granted: It is thus a rather cheap way of ensuring, or of trying to ensure, the book’s emotional heft. As it stands, the set-up yields only a repetitive pastiche of survival memoir and horror movie. For most of mankind’s remainder, rape and cannibalism are the order of the day. (In a scene that is far too macabre to be affecting, the survivalist duo comes upon a campsite where an infant has been roasted on a spit.)
Neither the man nor the boy is named, presumably that we might see that this fate could befall any one of us. But this is one of the book’s big failings—its insistence on stripping its heroes of any distinguishing characteristics, any personality. They are reticent, even sullen, which, however credible it may be, can only make for tedium in a novel. We learn little about their former lives, only that the boy’s mother committed suicide. What do they come from? What else have they left behind?
What makes a survival story engaging is who is doing the surviving. If one is lost in the jungle, one wants a Green Beret for a companion; if one is just reading about it, one likes it to be an asthmatic British choirboy. McCarthy, avoiding either extreme, leaves us with two unremarkable Everymen, and even their narrowest escapes and near-death experiences are difficult to get very excited about or invested in.
All this brings to mind something that Wilkie Collins observed in the preface to the second edition of The Woman in White:
The primary object of the work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character … the effect produced by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters.
McCarthy has no characters and little story, but at any rate he seems to find both of these secondary to language—which he uses in an increasingly clumsy and self-parodic way. Here is a passage from an actual parody of No Country for Old Men, published in The Guardian in London:
He glassed the Texan desert with a pair of 12 power german binoculars. There were men lying on the ground beside two four wheel drive trucks.
Agua, said the one man still alive.
Compare a passage from The Road: “Then he got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal sketch.” The word “gray,” by the way, appears nearly twenty times in the first twenty-five pages.
The conscientiously grim dialogue makes Clint Eastwood’s Harry look like Rodney Dangerfield. A typical exchange: “Are we going to die?” “Sometime. Not now.”
McCarthy’s premise offers innumerable possibilities for exploring civilization, its opposite, and how easily we might slide from one to the other. He could have done this with people rather than monochrome landscape and B-movie overkill. Then again, even a zombie flick might hinge on the grudging cooperation between, let’s say, a gangster, a cop, and a businessman. McCarthy prefers a lonesome tabula rasa who muses: “If only my heart were stone.”
Isn’t it, though? Somehow I can’t see our hero—or, more importantly, our author—as a fellow who could enjoy a good laugh at the death of Little Nell.