Hit The Road With Cormac Mcarthy

The book beat has induced mental bulimia. It is the condition to gorge on an unhealthy amount of literature regarding a specific topic and induce word/prose vomit to entertain you the reader.

This practice proved to make me fully unstable. Thus, I promised myself to take a break and just read a book without letting my brain go like a hamster running on a wheel at 500 mph to the moon.

With this goal in mind, I planned to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road on a road trip (get it?). As soon as I reach the tollgate, this idea proved to be disastrous as I quickly moved my holiday into a working holiday i.e reading and reviewing on the highway. As you will read, it is not as easy as it sounds.

New Paths

The Road is about a father and son surviving a world better left to expire due to a nuclear holocaust. This is the author’s first pultizer prize that he won last year. Although, the 74 year-old Cormac McCarthy is no hitchhiker in the literary highway whose first novel The Orchard was written in 1965. His works have been turned into films such as 2001 All The Pretty Horse starring Billy Bob Thorton and the gruesome No Country for Old Men that won the 2008 Oscar for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor.

As fellow Supreme writer Gino dela Paz wrote in his review for No Country for Old Men in this month issue of Rogue magazine, the power of McCarthy lies in “the restraint to denote danger and what we don’t see” and this sends his story out of clicheville. The Road travels in the same vein even if it is McCarthy’s first foray into the future dystopia genre. The author’s sophistication is shown in his economy of words. Every sentence is disturbingly dry and generally hollow with flowery prose. The words chosen seem to be as reserved out of precise desperation like novel’s protagonists who need to save their resources in a landscape devoid of natural resources and adequate shelter.

Admittedly, the first few pages were unsettling because the lack of detail made it difficult to grasp the author’s intent. Then, you unknowingly caught up and lost in McCarthy’s world that are free of the usual lamp posts of chapter numbers. This part of the novel is when you realize that Cormac is indeed a Pultizer Prize genius because paranoia has crept in without your discretion.

Up Ahead

Aside from actual form, relationship between the main characters is at times rather effectively eerie as conversations are usually terse dialogues about their inevitable fate with the father asking his son to trust him. There is even some psychological word play as father and son are never named. The father is also referred to as the man and the son as the child. This makes The Road’s journey achingly good as the author has set up a plot akin to M. Night Shyamalan or Alfred Hitchcock films where there is a promise of a sagacious payoff with a tinge of anxiety along the way. In this case, it is fight to finish to bone dry novel to find out the final fates of the father and son as they march on arid landscapes.

This is possibly why it is has been picked to up to be released as a film starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron this November. The book was just teeming with internal and external drama that it had to be placed on film.

Road Trip

Yet, is it advisable to read The Road on a road trip? I found out that staring at the barren farm land going to Batangas can double the paranoia set in the novel. I felt the trip would never end like the road taken by father and son. Other than that cheap lesson, readers have tagged The Road as a cautionary tale about protecting the environment because of the global warming conscious world today.

   The author although seems not in morality or environment play but is simply fascinated by issues of life and death. McCarthy has been quoted as saying that books that don’t deal with these topics are not literature. In the case of The Road, it is a piece of literature because it is a meditation on how we see each day’s tomorrow and acknowledging that we can’t control the wheel all the time. Most importantly, it ends with the hopeful wisdom that the end of one road is just the beginning of another.

*  *  *

Learn more about Cormac McCarthy: http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/

The Road available at National Book Store

*  *  *

Email the author at readnow@supreme.ph