The Road

After seeing No Country For Old Men and reading how the Coen brothers had lifted the dialogue almost word-for-word from the original novel, I knew I had to read me some Cormac McCarthy. And where else to start but last year's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Road?

Frankly though, I'm astounded that The Road won such a prestigious award. Not because it isn't a great book - the superlatives run dry. No, I'm surprised because it's just not the sort of subject matter you expect to see winning mainstream critical plaudits. Hell, it's almost... genre!

A man and his son walk across a post-apocalyptic America in search of food, shelter and hope. Could this be sci-fi!? Their fight to survive means keeping away from the remaining tatters of humanity, now mostly reduced to cannibalism and savagery. Wait - is this horror?

Actually, it's both. At its heart though, The Road is about the bond between a father and his son. Their stripped down conversations convey so much about their attitudes, their predicament, and their insight into each other. The father always tries to keep the boy's spirits up, the boy refuses to let his dad sacrifice too much on his behalf.

You think we're going to die, don't you?

I don't know.

We're not going to die.

Okay.

But you don't believe me.

I don't know.

Why do you think we're going to die?

We don't have anything to eat.

We'll find something.

Okay.

How long do you think people can go without food?

I don't know.

But how long do you think?

Maybe a few days.

And then what? You fall over dead?

Yes.

Well you don't. It takes a long time. We have water. That's the most important thing. You don't last very long without water.

Okay.

But you don't believe me.

I don't know.

Do you think I lie to you?

No.

But you think I might lie to you about dying.

Yes.

Okay. I might. But we're not dying.

Okay.

Beyond this absorbing core relationship, The Road also succeeds through the power of McCarthy's prose. The ash-grey nuclear winter (cause unknown - it could be war, it could just as easily be a natural catastrophe like a super-volcano or meteorite strike) would be a bleak and depressing landscape for most writers, but McCarthy uses language like a painter, finding unexpected beauty among the carnage. Never overwriting, he makes every word count, as in the very best poetry.

At evening a dull sulphur light from the fires. The standing water in the roadside ditches black with the runoff. The mountains shrouded away. They crossed a river by a concrete bridge where skeins of ash and slurry moved slowly in the current. Charred bits of wood. In the end they stopped and turned back and camped under the bridge.

So then, touchingly observed characterisation and a vivid yet economic narrative. Storytelling at its best. Genre aside, The Road deserves its mainstream recognition. Then again, that's nothing Ray Bradbury wasn't doing 50 years ago. And although Bradbury's contribution to American literature was also recognised by the Pulitzer Board last year, even then it was with the caveat "for his distinguished, prolific, and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy". Perhaps it's the fact the McCarthy's previous work has been more traditional, or perhaps it's a growing acceptance of quality writing whatever the genre - a breaking down the walls of genre snobbery - that allows a novel like The Road to be seen for what it is: great literature, whatever the subject matter.

Imagine John Steinbeck had written I Am Legend... right there you'd have Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I can't give it any higher praise than that.