Review

The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Knopf; 256pp

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth.
If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless sabre-rattling by the global powers, it’s not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner.
Stealing across this horrific landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of 10. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy’s previous work. McCarthy’s Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing.
But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else.
 In The Road, the entire world is, quite literally, dying, so the final affirmation of hope in the novel’s closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring.