The Road

"Winner"

"The Road is a very spare novel by Cormac McCarthy . Humanity has been wiped out, for the most part. There’s a man and his son traveling on a road to try to get to where it’s rumored that sprouts of civilization are starting to grow again. It’s a very minimalistic book. It’s very sparse and elegiac, just with those two characters. Apocalyptic fiction can lend itself to that technique because post-apocalyptic plots are about the destruction of civilization. That’s very much what McCarthy does in The Road. It’s just the man, the boy, the road and the journey. The tone of the book matches its apocalyptic themes. But there’s also something very redemptive in the book because it spotlights our primal desire to carry on from one generation to the next quite beautifully."

"I am a huge Cormac McCarthy fan. I would go so far as to say that I consider him the best living writer. The Road isn’t actually my all-time favourite McCarthy book. That would be Blood Meridian which is an apocalyptic Western in which a band of desperados are hired to go to Mexico to kill Indians and they become this rampaging massacring army and it is scene after scene of surreal and endless violence. But The Road is such a powerful story. You have this utterly bleak scenario and it is incredible how he draws on this limited palette of blackness and ash and coldness and snow. There is virtually nothing to hold on to. But then against this situation you have the father and the son, and the novel builds up this incredibly emotive relationship. Not least because you see the sacrifices the father has to make in terms of what it means to be human to protect his son. He has to be ruthless because everything has regressed back to a brutal kill or be killed state of nature. But the son retains some humanity. There is a bit where someone tries to steal their cart full of stuff and they stop him and the father makes this man take off all his clothes and confiscates the guy’s clothes and they walk off and leave him, knowing he will obviously die. And the son is saying, ‘Why did we have to do that?’ And the dad explains, ‘We had to, otherwise he would have done it to us by taking our things.’ But the love the father has for the son and the son’s innate humanity are the two glimmers of hope which endure through the book. It is one of those devastating books which by the time you finish it leaves you numb and changed. I think McCarthy has looked very hard and honestly at the most difficult questions anyone can face about the meaning of life and he has extracted this kind, wonderful, powerful, unforgettable story from it."

"See, in another sense, I think The Road is probably McCarthy’s happiest book. Which is a little weird to say, but it does have the most sincere and overt love relationship of all of his works, between the father and the son. It’s very purely represented. It’s a relationship that is not without its complications, but beginning, middle and end, you can’t doubt the importance of that love and the sustained power of it, and its priority both for the characters and the premise of the book as a whole. “I think The Road is probably McCarthy’s happiest book” So it is a book that is very bleak, but if you’re always looking in McCarthy’s work at this dynamic between human violence—or even the violence of the natural world and what is balanced against that, which is community— The Road , to me, tips pretty heavily in favour of community, even as the violence is so pervasive and disturbing. And I think that’s why people responded to it. 2006 was really the other turning point in McCarthy’s career. Before, he was a well-known author and a best-selling author. But when The Road came out, I think he became beloved in a way that he hadn’t been before. When you’re on Oprah, it’s a sign, right? And I think partly it was because of the way he depicted that relationship. Some would say so, yes. I should preface that by saying this book has now surpassed Blood Meridian as being the book that has drawn the most scholarship. That’s kind of remarkable. Of all of McCarthy’s work, this one has the most stuff written about it. And it’s been written about in just about every way you can imagine. We mentioned theology or morality; it’s been written about in terms of economics. Is this the end of capitalism ? Everybody just consumes one another right at the end. Is it about masculinity without social context, and what that means? But a lot of people have said we should see it as environmental literature. Eco-critics see it as a warning of what it would be like to lose the natural world. I think that’s pretty potent. Another thing McCarthy said to Oprah was: we ought to be grateful. It’s hard to read this book and not then look up from the page and feel some relief at colour and warmth, and trees, and life bubbling around you. In that sense, as a way of reminding you that those things can be lost, and the loss would be profound in ways that you can’t really imagine perhaps without art like this, then certainly we should read it as environmental literature. We do. His most recent work is actually an essay. It was his first published non-fiction in 2017 in the science magazine Nautilus . It’s called “ The Kekulé Problem .” It’s about consciousness and language, and is a fascinating read. What we’ve been hearing for 20 years is that he’s been working on a very big novel that we think is called The Passenger . It’s funny: I think in the very first issue of The Cormac McCarthy Journal , back in 2001, the then-editor mentioned that it might be about to come out in her editorial introduction. And it’s still not out. So who knows. I have not heard of any publication date, although every once in a while there will be a rumour that it will come out next season . . . and then it doesn’t. But you know, that science essay just dropped all of a sudden. He did the same thing with The Road and with No Country for Old Men. They just popped out, and nobody knew they were coming. That’s one of the fun things about studying a still-living author: you never know what kind of surprises you’ll get. But we do know that there will at least be one more book to come."

"This is maybe a corny choice, as it’s very famous and widely read. But it’s a book that had a huge effect on me, and one I’ve returned to over the years. I first read it as a student, and I remember finishing this book while I was sitting on a train and weeping, and people looking at me, wondering if I was going through some kind of crisis. It was the first time I’d ever just wept at a book. It’s a strange feeling. And it made me think: this is what literature can do. This is the power it has. I’ve read it several times in the years since then, and recently read it again as I’m going to become a father in the next month or so. I began to see that dimension of the book: that it is a book about the future, a book about the old world giving way to something new. And to me, that’s what I like to look at. For some people, the collapse of the Roman Empire or the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, the fall of Angkor in Cambodia, felt like the end of the world. But it was also the beginning of a new world. There’s always something that sprouts out of the ashes of devastation. There’s a hope in it. Once you have abandoned hope that the present can continue, you make way for new hope that something better, more sustainable might take its place. Even if that is in the next generation."

"I think this is possibly the most important environmental book ever written. It is a thought-experiment that imagines the world without a biosphere. That is the fundamental thought-experiment at the heart of environmentalism. All the horrors of that story arise from the disappearance of the biosphere, leaving people without any means of feeding themselves and without any means of survival. They are thrown into a brutal and fatal competition where the only thing left to eat is each other. As both a thought-experiment and a metaphor, it is incredibly powerful and valuable because it reminds us that without the biosphere we have nothing, we are nothing and we can do nothing except to tear each other apart. By describing such a scenario, it reminds us of just what a precious and magnificent thing we have in the living world. If I were to compile an environmental reading list for anyone, the first book I would give them to read would be The Road because that is the Ground Zero of environmentalism. It imagines the extreme scenario of losing everything. The consequences are conveyed with McCarthy’s brilliant sparseness and starkness, and his total refusal to offer hope where there is no hope. By contrast, the film version of The Road did try to offer some shreds of hope in an entirely hopeless situation. As such, I felt it was dishonest. In many ways it was a great film. The cinematography was astonishing. But it was not true to the book, because it kept trying to offer us glimpses of hope and a way out, whereas McCarthy is saying that there is no way out. I felt that the ending of McCarthy’s novel was completely misunderstood by the film. I saw the ending of the novel as looking back to what had been lost. You can’t conceive brook trout from nothing. If there are no trout then there can be no trout. It is this contrast which is moving and terrible. By contrast, in the film the ending became a message of hope and renewal. Yet there would be no chance within any human span of hope and renewal. In hundreds of millions of years, perhaps, the biosphere could return. After the Permian–Triassic extinction, it was tens of millions of years before marine biodiversity got back to what it was. It happened eventually but it would not happen again during the period in which humans were extant on earth, especially if we had lost the biosphere. So, the film ending was a cop-out in that respect. But it almost had to be because McCarthy is so uncompromising: it’s almost too much to bear. There are many different versions of apocalypse, both religious and secular. And there are various environmental situations that readily lend themselves to apocalyptic description. Think of the Iraq War , which played out in a post-apocalyptic landscape. This was the cradle of civilisation: the very first cities and the very first agriculture began there in Mesopotamia. The British zone is where the Epic of Gilgamesh was set. There were a series of extraordinarily rich, diverse civilisations that had existed in what is now a grey desert littered with the burnt out remains of Saddam Hussein’s tanks. Every one of those civilisations has been completely erased, but for certain archaeological artifacts and the odd mound sticking out of the desert. All of them have been destroyed by a combination of environmental change and human agency. The primary reason was the rivers changing course: suddenly these city states had no sustenance because the rivers no longer provided irrigation for their fields. What you see in Mesopotamian history is a whole series of civilisations rising, often lasting for many hundreds or thousands of years. The empires lasted far longer than empires do in the modern age. And you see them not just collapsing but utterly disappearing into the grey dust. If you remember back to all those scenes of soldiers fighting in the desert, they were fighting over the remains of those previous civilisations. So, apocalypse is there in the entire history of civilisation. We live in a sort of civilizational interglacial. We live in a little period of respite from apocalypse. But in all civilisations, people forget how lucky they are to be in that respite. And through a combination of environmental change and endogenous civilisational collapse (which might be accelerated by raiders and opposing empires and armies), all civilisations eventually fall and succumb to apocalypse. So, the idea of apocalypse as discussed by environmentalists is not some far-flung black fantasy. It’s simply what happens to everyone eventually. “We live in a little period of respite from apocalypse.” In the case of The Road , what makes its environmental apocalypse particularly notable is that humans take most life-forms with them. Human beings are remarkably resilient. This is one of the things that the novel suggests: everything else has gone but there are still human beings on the planet. That seems quite plausible to me: we are a highly adaptable generalist species which can survive when we have wiped out all of the specialist species and then most of the generalist species as well. And it is quite likely to come down to rats, cockroaches, human beings, and not much else. It is an extreme scenario. On the spectrum of potential apocalypses, it is the ultimate one, when you lose everything. But along that spectrum are a whole series of other losses, some of which we are experiencing at the moment: look at what’s happening to coral reefs, rainforests, ice caps, insects, and megafauna on both land and at sea. Well, it should be. And I think Cormac McCarthy has done us a great service in creating that thought-experiment. It is a challenge to all the economists who say that the environment is just an ‘externality’, and that we don’t need to worry about it because the market will sort it out. Well fix that then, market!"

"I noticed that my book Living with the Living Dead was reviewed on a zombie studies site the other day, and they were somewhat indignant that I included The Road on the grounds that there are no zombies in this book. And in a sense, they’re right. There is no creature that has been transformed by leaking chemicals or radioactive satellites. But, on the other hand, there are human beings who consume other humans and that informs the major conflicts of the book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So, you’ve got a post-apocalyptic setting and you’ve got ethical quandaries for the main characters. There’s the sense of menace that permeates the zombie apocalypse. It’s not bad enough that they’re going to kill you, they’re also going to eat you. What I love about this story is its literary quality. We tend to think of the zombie apocalypse as a low-culture, pulp phenomenon. Sure. Yet with The Road , we’ve got what is essentially a zombie apocalypse story that is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Angela Kang, one of the writers and executive producers of The Walking Dead , told me that she is not interested in zombies per se, but in human beings and what they are willing to do to survive. In The Road , the man and the boy stand in for every human in every zombie apocalypse story. What are they willing to do to survive? What do they do in terms of their resources? Do they share them or do they hoard them? In the contacts that they make with other human beings, do they react with fear or do they react with welcome? It’s such a beautifully written book, although highly fraught. You’ve got a great artist who wants to ask some universal human questions. By the time you come to the end of that novel, you have really explored what it’s like to live in a world where human beings are beset by threats coming from all directions. As we look at the world at this moment, I can say that I personally as an American don’t want to respond to every threat by building walls. But that’s a choice that some people make. The father in this story basically says that all he cares about is his son’s survival, and he is not going to share anything that they have. That is an ethical choice that some people make. It’s an ethical choice that the United States made after 9/11: basically, the US held that it would do some unpleasant things in order to increase its chance of survival. The son is a marvellous character because in his innocence he is constantly checking his father. He keeps asking his father whether they are good—whether they are the good guys. The father comes up with a sort of pseudo-religious construct: that they are ‘carrying the fire’. If you were in a George Miller Mad Max apocalypse story, and if you saw someone coming down the road towards you, you should probably turn and run in the other direction. But the son keeps asking the question: are we the good guys? In encounter after encounter, they make choices that are very narrowly focussed on themselves. “Parallel ethical questions that we need to ask ourselves post-9/11 are: how do we relate to the other people or cultures that we have to encounter? Do we react to them with fear because we have encountered some people who are frightening?” Parallel ethical questions that we need to ask ourselves post-9/11 are: how do we relate to the other people or cultures that we have to encounter? Do we react to them with fear because we have encountered some people who are frightening? Or do we react to them with compassion and generosity, because people may be more well-disposed towards us if we treat them with kindness? Another kind of ethical question explored in The Road has to do with why we are here. The father explicitly says that he has been appointed by God to take care of his son, and that if anyone tries to touch his son he will kill them. The son, in his innocence, is basically pushing back and giving the answer that we get from many of the great wisdom traditions as well as from moral atheism, which is that if he is the most important thing on the planet, then the planet is probably worthless. This position is that there has got to be something more important than me and my desires and my life. I want to live for something more than that and I want to believe that there is something bigger than me. Well, I am sure that there are some Catholic critics who do that because McCarthy was raised Catholic and you cannot shed it. I was raised Southern Baptist, which is conservative evangelical Christian, and however far to the left I go in terms of my own faith and cultural beliefs, there is still some part of me that knows all of the verses to ‘Amazing Grace’. I think one of the things that makes the image of carrying the fire so wonderful is that it can be applied to a range of different traditions. If we read it as straight Christian, we might want to think of it in terms of some of the New Testament ideas around community. At the end of the book, the question becomes: are we going to be like this isolated dyad going through whatever is left of our lives together, or are we going to open ourselves up to the possibility that we could be part of a larger community? What McCarthy does in a very faintly hopeful way is to come down on the side of larger community."

"It seems a strange choice, right? After all, on the surface it’s a novel set in a bleak post-apocalyptic world covered in the grey, ashen remains of a civilisation in which nothing grows. Those that have survived have done so by raiding the cupboards of the past and, in some cases, resorting to cannibalism in the face of starvation. It’s quite shocking and unsettling, in that sense. It stands in complete contrast to the recent wave of nature writing which, if you were to get carried away by some of it, would have you believe that things in the natural world have never been rosier. On its simplest level, The Road shows us what it could be like to live on a planet where we’ve wiped out everything. It seemed like an extreme biblical vision until I read David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming , which appears to be (rightly, and brilliantly) scaring the shit out of everyone. I can already see the signs of this on the micro level too. While I was planting trees on four acres of industrially farmed land in Norfolk last year, I encountered three worms over a long weekend. Three. Though the rivers near me, which were teeming with fish only a century ago, are not the grim, black soup of ash and water that they are in The Road , most are just as dead and devoid of fish as they are in the nightmarish world McCarthy imagined. I could go on. I won’t. But in this sense The Road acts as a warning, showing us what a world without much life could look and feel like, and for that alone it is terribly important. “It’s the greatest novel ever written and McCarthy one of the most important writers of the last hundred years” But there is another aspect that gets overlooked. It gives the reader a deep insight into what it might feel like to be a wild animal. The man, and increasingly the boy, are always on the lookout, always aware that they could fall prey to cannibals. It keeps them alert at every moment, and in that sense they’re always present, always fully alive, even as they teeter on the brink of starvation. Death—for all animals, both predator and prey—is only kept at bay through absolute mindfulness. In our overly comfortable, sedated, too-safe civilised world, we need mindfulness colouring books and counselling to address our lack of connection to life and death. It’s as Leopold said: ‘Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run’. In my view, The Road is the greatest novel ever written, and McCarthy one of the most important writers of the last hundred years. Its bleakness is interspersed with sentences so beautiful I wept. Reading it in front of a warm fire with a good, fresh meal also reminds me to be grateful for everything we still have. Whether or not we can save what’s left of the natural world is a big question, but we ought to at least savour it."

"On vacation, I like books that are dark and engrossing, like All Quiet on the Western Front or Cormac McCarthy's The Road."

"Cormac McCarthy's The Road."

"My most memorable book-related weeping occurred early in Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road.'"

"It gives a sense of the fragility of the world. Plus, each sentence is very short — about the length of a tweet."

"Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”"

"P.S. 'The Road' is an amazing book!"

"I was just crying like a baby. The humanity and love is there right from the first line of the book."

"I remember crying at the end of "The Road," by Cormac McCarthy."

"Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," perhaps? Yes, I'll choose that."

"Hero: The father who never gives up protecting his son in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road.""