The Road

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I hate to be the one to say this, but I hope the movie will be better than the book. I really thought the book was bad, well not bad, but tedious. I hate minimalist writing, I hate Hemingway too.

People seem to think it was awesome and some have suggested that it asked “hard questions”.

What exactly was so awesome about it? What hard questions did it ask? I just got back from a conference on Apocalyptic fiction and this was one of the books that was presented on. Not everyone thought it was great and many seemed to think that it was over-publicized as a work of art. To be honest, it took me twice to get through it because I thought it was really a boring and inconsistent read. Like most of McCarthy's books, he tends to ramble and over stress scenes and they make much better movies than books. No Country for Old Men being an example.

I'm really trying to figure out why people think this is wonderful. I was not that impressed is all. I thought that as a survival-apocalyptic book, One Second After was a better read with better plotting and more readable. Alas Babylon even better and it’s over fifty years old.

No matter how hard I try to get people to tell me, no one has yet to answer what Hard Questions the book asked.

If you want to look at the book as a story about a father and son and sacrifice, okay. I don't really buy into it though. The truth is that the father didn't really do anything to keep the kid alive. They "happened" upon food at just the right moments, he didn't really give the son any skills to keep alive and if truth be told, the only survival skill he ever presented to his son was how to kill himself to keep from being eaten alive. The fathers fear of outsiders probably got him killed. There is at least one occasion when he could have banded with someone else, but chose not to due to the man stealing their gear. Do I agree with him being pissed? Yes, but in a situation like the one in The Road, I think that there comes a time when you have to start taking a chance.

Someone mentioned to me about civilization. What civilization?

How was civilization continuing? That just didn't happen. Civilization was in a downward spiral and the few trying to exist were so caught up in continuing their own existence, they did not take any steps for the next generation. The father and son simply continued that fall through their fear of everyone that moved.

Maybe because of my mindset and that of my families, we all read the book and our first thought was "these people are stupid".

Were there moments of good story telling? Yes, I think that there were. One that comes to mind was the father trying to explain how to eat the food in the bunker. One of the presenters at the conference looked at the language and the failure of the characters to keep the language alive. He also explored the moments when the father was remembering the things of the past and how they were no longer relevant because the subjects of the word no longer existed. How peaches were no longer peaches because they no longer existed, but peaches had become the cans containing the peaches. How the word "Cow" meant nothing due to there no longer being cows, but because he remembered how cows smelled in the barn, the father still had an association with the word, but it would be lost to his son.

Moments like those were good, But not Nobel Prize worthy.

Now the Hard Question; would we sacrifice all to save our children. The pat answer is yes. However, in the scenario presented by the book, the father would have actually been better off letting his wife kill the boy when she herself committed suicide. There was nothing left. Nothing was growing, nothing was living but people (which I find improbable) and the amount of food avaliable was finite and there was no chance of getting more.

I'm not trying to detract from those who liked the book. But I am asking the question again; what about the book was so wonderful?

Please don't give the "You hated it so you won't understand" answers. Explain what you thought was good about it. The Devil is in the Details.

I had someone tell me that The Road wasn’t Homer (thinking that by referring to Homer I would have to say “Of course not, Homer is classic.”)

Well, you're right, McCarthy's not Homer. But then, Homer isn't really all that either, if you read his work. The Iliad and Oddysy are believed to have had multiple authors and their works are attributed to Homer, who more than likely just compiled the stories under his name. Both those tales are more of an "edited by" rather than "written by" as modern linguistic historians delve into the origins of the tale.

But I digress.

I am trying to decide just what about this book rather than others of the same genre has seemed to capture the fancy of so many people. Is it that Oprah liked it? She also liked The Notebook. There are glaring flaws that if you are a prepper, you would find mildly offensive that the characters even survived the collapse of civilization. There is dumb luck and McCarthy seems to have relied too much (for myself and many) on that principle.

I don't so much believe that we as human rely so much on "nature" any longer. I believe that as animals with higher thought processes, we sift through logical responses as we are able to and make decisions from there. While we still have fight or flight, those two responses can be trained out of a person and you can be made to fight against what some would call "your will". The father was training his son to commit suicide in The Road. Making the decision to kill a child, your child, to prevent them from suffering what you might consider a harmful event, is something which we can do, and as you pointed out, might be taking place even now.

I don't think in a situation as given in The Road, the choice is as difficult as you are making it. The father made the choice already, he even had schooled his son in how to kill himself. My complaint is this: He never taught his son how to live first.

To me, that is the real problem with the story. They don't live, they exist. They have ceased to be functioning humans and a part of humanity. There's not even any real joy in the fathers love. It is simply there because the boy was the fruit of his loin, not because he expressed it with action or words. That was the failing of the book, on a more base level, the inability of the father to teach his son how to live.

For instance, as an example, when smelling the old manure in the barn and thinking about cows, the father doesn't bring him into the barn as say "Son, inhale deeply and tell me what you smell--that's what cows smelled like." There's no passing on of information, only telling as needed. Even in a situation as dismal as presented in The Road, it would behoove me to at least try to make sure that my son was able to exist without me and even carry on knowledge that might seem unimportant. Even in the "Canticle for Lebowitz" there is the need to retain past knowledge as flawed as that retention might be.

But back to the failing of the fathers love. You might argue that the "love" was expressed by keeping the boy alive. I would argue that no matter the relationship, the man would have striven to keep someone alive. We see this action everyday, through the work of firefighters, police and medical personnel. You can argue that they do it because it is their job, but there is a percentage of them (myself in that percentage) who do it because they on some level have to. The father failed in my book not because he was keeping the son alive, but because he was not teaching the son to live beyond the moment. The argument could also be made that the father did not even love the son enough to kill him; why would you keep the child alive just to suffer knowing there was nothing beyond that moment, no future because life was dead?