More than a week after being wrung out by the emotional mangle of its closing pages, I still find that in the mind’s eye Cormac McCarthy’s The Road–to borrow Philip Larkin’s words–“Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.” As a host of critics, from Adam-Mars Jones to Oprah, have already discussed this dark masterpiece, I won’t detain you with my critique. Apart from bluntly insisting it’s a brilliant work, a mesmerizing imbrication of tenderness and dread, I’d like to post two footnotes–one trivial, one slightly “deeper”–to the discussion about the book.
First, in The Guardian, George Monbiot argued that The Road is perhaps “the most important environmental book ever written.”
He goes on: “Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot.[…] All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do? The only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.”
All true. I then read a rare interview with McCarthy which opens with a survey of the exterior of the Santa Fe Institute, a high-brow think-tank of which McCarthy is an incongruous faculty member:
“The parking lot at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, features rows of vehicles typical of American academia-S.U.V.'s and minivans, a few older-model BMWs and Mercedeses, a Toyota Prius, and an inordinate number of Subarus and Hondas. […] Standing out from the crowd is a red Ford F-350 diesel pickup with Texas plates. Equipped with a Banks PowerPack that boosts the 7.3-liter engine to more than 300 hp, it has a stripped-down profile in back, like a wrecker's, with no winch.
[…] The owner of the truck [is] the novelist Cormac McCarthy”
So McCarthy might be adept at envisaging the destruction of the biosphere but such nightmares ain’t going to stop him driving a big-ass truck. (Perhaps he has to haul wood, dead game, or similar Hemingwayesque loads.)
On a slightly more serious level, in the New York Review of Books, the writer Michael Chabon pondered what might be the ultimate “message” behind the novel:
“The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child’s own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing–as every parent fears–that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited”
Again there is truth in this statement, but it also led me back to a nagging question about being a parent. It seems to me that the major contradiction of being a parent (in many, not all cases) in the affluent West is that doing “the best” for one’s offspring legitimises selfish behaviour, making the world a little “more damaged, more poisoned, more base.”
For example, you want to ensure your DNA carriers are safe when on the road, so you might buy an SUV (although perhaps one not quite as macho as McCarthy’s). Nevermind the higher CO2 omissions, it seems you are willing to decapitate another family with your bumper in order to protect your own. And then there’s the hot-button issue of schools–the ones with a dodgy reputation are abandoned by those who can make a choice, thus depriving struggling institutions of the very mix of classes and abilities needed if they have any chance of improvement. Thus the gap between the educated winners and the resentful, functionally illiterate underclass widens.
And as children mature into adulthood, the networks of nepotism and favouritism kick in when available, ensuring berths are secured for family members on the elevator going up. Those with the talent, but without the connections, find getting on board considerably less easy.
All this unfolds against a screen showing an avalanche of prefabricated entertainments, fast food, and instantly forgettable toys from the Guangdong Province–all doing little for the toxicity of a planet we are intending to “pass on” one day.
But that’s not to say I won’t be persuaded a buy a HappyMeal within the next few weeks.