Cormac McCarthy has developed a reputation as a writer who specialises in dark novels about desperate people.  This apple, though one of his most recent, could have given root to the whole tree.  Set in some vague, largely depopulated post-apocalyptic future where clouds and ash have blanketed the world, killing plant life and bringing global temperatures crashing (suggesting it could have been a nuclear war that triggered the cataclysm), it is about a father and his young son traveling south along tarmacked stretches of highway in search of warmer weather and more hospitable environs, and the horrifying difficulties they encounter along the way.

For all the setting and the recounting of the travails of the characters (they are nameless, known only as “the man” and “the boy”), this book is, at its core, a love story: a father’s overpowering, uplifting, burdensome, compelling, beautiful love for his son.  It drives him ever onward and is the motivation for every single action he takes in the book: he’s ill and, with no medical care available, he wants to get to where his son will have the best chance of survival before what he obviously feels will be his inevitable passing.

They have little choice at any rate, as life has become essentially untenable in the places through which they travel; food has become so scarce (since plants can no longer grow, there is no vegetation and also therefore no animals, and any reserves of canned or otherwise preserved food are either gone or spoiled) that the only recourse left to most survivors — such few as still exist — is cannibalism.  The man and the boy manage to scrape enough to avoid descending to that level, but the price they pay is almost constant near-starvation.  Combined with always being in danger of freezing to death, this means they endure a brutal existence.  Also, it means that every single encounter they have with other people is a matter of life and death: people trying to kill them (for food and/or clothes – shoes are a particularly hot commodity), or meeting someone and wondering if the person(s) will try to kill them, or abandoning someone to circumstances that must mean their death.  It’s dark and depressing, but utterly compelling, leaving you wondering until the end whether the man will manage to get his son to a warmer, safer place.

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This book is brilliant on so many levels, but the way it speaks to me the most is as a father.  McCarthy captures both the love and the relationship between the man and the boy so perfectly.

Before I had kids of my own, I thought I knew love: for friends, for family, for my wife.  On the day my first child – my son – was born, though, I realised that these were but pale imitations of what true love really feels like: a parent’s love for their child.  Nothing even comes close to touching this.  Most parents would tell you this.  When I held him for the first time, I looked into his eyes and I was utterly, irrevocably dragged under by a riptide of emotion, and I delighted in drowning in it, as if I’d never known the taste of air or what it was to be standing on firm, dry ground.  On that day I rang my mother, and I apologised to her for any and all of the crap I had done or put her through when I was growing up, because I finally understood: this was how she felt about me, and no loving parent deserves any of the heartache, stress and strife that their kids subject them to as they as they grow and mature (and oh, you get that in spades).

Which is not to say that, when your kids are at their supreme naughtiest, there aren’t moments you feel like literally murdering them (which is probably why we are programmed to love them so intensely: survival of the species).  Even then, though, you still love them with every fibre of your being, and all it takes is an “I’m sorry,” an apologetic hug, and a little grin, and all is forgiven.

It is this love that drives the man ever-onward and informs his every action.  I (and most parents) would quite literally do anything to protect my children, and the man reflects this.  Starve myself that my child might eat for even one more day?  Check.  Sacrifice warmth, comfort and sleep if it means my child can have them instead?  No question.  Withhold food or aid from other people if it means ensuring the health and safety of my child?  Absolutely.  Kill someone to protect the life of my child?  Without a moment’s hesitation or an ounce of remorse.

[Maybe I'm a bit on the fringes of society on this, but if someone came up to me and said, "Press this button to blow up that bus full of people or we will kill your children," I would jab that button until my finger broke.  I'm not sure what that says about my relationship with society as a whole, but there you go.  Of course, maybe I shouldn't admit that in a public forum, as I've just sent up a red flag to terrorists and criminals everywhere: "Hey, guys!  Kidnap my kids and I'll do anything you want!  Seriously, come and get 'em!"  Ah well, live by the sword...]

If the love the man has for the boy drives the plot, the relationship they share is the heart of the book.  In much the same way that men tend to hang out with other men and women generally have other women for friends, so too do fathers and mothers tend to have slightly different relationships with their children depending on whether they’re boys or girls.  This is a father-son relationship in the classical mold: not necessarily a lot of talking, but then there doesn’t necessarily need to be.  Quiet understanding is the order of the day – they know each other intimately from having spent the entirety of the boy’s young life together, constantly on the move or on the run, living quiet lives of desperation punctuated by brutality. If they do talk, it is either situational – that is, revolving around events about to happen, occurring now, or just past – or else a brief conversation that the reader gets the idea is little more than cud-chewing, recycling past material: generally the boy wondering what will become of them, and his father having little or no words of real comfort to offer him.

The boy is, in a sense, the tragic figure in this Greek play: brought into a situation not of his choosing, subject to forces beyond his understanding and out of his control.  This horrific existence is all he has ever known, and it has left its indelible mark on him, announced by his reticence, described by his silences, played out in his solemn demeanour.  A world that so savagely smothers a child’s laughter is a dead world, and this one passed to ashes long ago.

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“While there is life, there is hope” – Cicero

Though the situation is bleak, it is not entirely without hope.  If they can just get a little bit farther, perhaps the weather will pick up enough to at least remove the threat of freezing, or maybe they’ll manage to find some lost stash of supplies that will keep them going a few days longer, or chance upon someone who might actually help them.  It is hope against reason, but then hope ever was, else it would be called expectation.  “The audacity of hope” is something that applies to few people in our oh-so-civilised Western society; rather, it is reserved for the truly desperate and down-and-out, those for whom it would seem to make more sense to long for death and a quick ending than to bother hoping for respite, especially of the sort that only drags out the suffering rather than improving the dire nature of the circumstances.  Hope, in that instance, is the ultimate luxury, the pinnacle of audacity.  Yet hope the man does, because his love for his son won’t permit him to do anything else.  There are days when hope fails him – they have a gun, but almost no bullets, and they are reserving the last two for themselves in case they are ever captured (there are places even hope will not follow, and better a quick death in those circumstances) – and the man contemplates giving his son that final, tender mercy rather than subject him to another day of their tortured, depressing lives.  His love is too strong, though, and hope wins out: so long as his body and his illness allow, he will continue to do everything in his power to secure some sort of future for his son, whatever that might be.

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This is a heartbreaking, uplifting book about the beauty and power of a father’s love for his son.  As such, it speaks to me on levels some people couldn’t possibly understand.  Which is not to say that it can’t be read and thoroughly enjoyed by anyone; it’s a brilliantly written book that would be accessible to anyone with love in their hearts.  Oprah even featured it in her book club.  But certainly if I’d read this before becoming a father, it would have been an entirely different experience for me.  Every father (or, indeed, mother) ought to read this, as should anyone wanting to understand their father better: just because he mightn’t talk to you as much, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t sacrifice everything – everything – for you if the need arose.  Read it, and think: this could be my father; this could be my child; this could be me.

Recommended further reading by Cormac McCarthy:  I haven’t read any of his other books, but of course his No Country for Old Men was made into a much-acclaimed movie by the Coen Brothers and is meant to be an excellent book; his novel Blood Meridian, according to Wikipedia, “was among Time Magazine’s poll of 100 best English-language books published between 1925 and 2005 and he placed joint runner-up for a similar title in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years.”

Next up: I haven’t decided yet.  I’m about to go on holidays for 2 weeks, though, so I’ll see you when I see you.

All the best,

M

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