Bleak vintage

by RICK KANE

Cormac McCarthy's latest 'The Road' is the postmodern novel par excellence as well as the composition that describes human experience in a post apocalyptic world that failed to heed Steinbeck 'The Grapes of Wrath'. 'The Road' could almost be read as what follows "(the) trampling out (of) the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored" (with respect and regard to 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic, by Julia Ward Howe, from whence Steinbeck took the title of his seminal work.

In 'The Grapes of Wrath' the combination of natural disaster, technological growth and capitalistic structures frame and seem to control the plight of a family, struggling to find food and shelter and maintain their dignity in a relentlessly cruel world. Steinbeck's novel is a plea for people to recognize that our survival is dependant on collaboration, cooperative solutions and commonly shared ideals and practices.

In 'The Road' the family, reduced to a father and son, is struggling to get to the sea, in a world barren of love and care and human dignity. To say that the world, as imagined in 'The Road' is cruel is to suggest that characters can even remember the world they knew once enough to compare better behaviours and values.

'The Road' is bleak. And disturbing. And frightening in that as you read you can imagine the world we live in spiraling out of control to the extent that it might descend into this terrible place McCarthy brings so vividly to life. As with Steinbeck's novel, 'The Road' offers the faintest glimpse of hope.

McCarthy is one of the great modern writers. His writing is pure and intense and simple and dense. Most of his other novels are quite wordy, yet still full of thought and insight. Here, he has pared back his words to a minimum, (it is almost as if by doing so he is making the point that there is nothing much left to say in a world gone so badly wrong).

However, the story is filled with exquisite lines and expressions. There is hardly a word out of place. You feel the pain and hunger and fear of the protagonists as they struggle along to god knows where. Hellish characters and situations are described so clearly the reader's experience is visceral to the extreme. Amongst the gore and rotting putrid flesh there is tenderness, strength and a powerful desire for survival.

The comparisons with 'The Grapes of Wrath' are plentiful. Both are journeys of the dispossessed. Both paint a frightful picture of their contemporary society and its inability to support its people. Both stories are morality tales and drive home a message so simple and obvious it is a wonder it doesn't smack us right in the kisser.

In the titles you can see a stark difference. Steinbeck's choice is a profound and direct metaphor. McCarthy's title is striped back to its most bare and basic resonance. Yet it is as profound. Steinbeck wrote his story against a backdrop of a smaller world view. McCarthy, living in the global village, tired of the endless debates and discussions that entwine and entrap us in rights and ownership and currencies stops and wonders for us what will basically drive us if all this is gone.

The hope McCarthy imagines and describes is not entwined in any individualistic response to the world but in trusting each other. That might seem simple but considering the times we are living in, the last few thousand years of progress and the fact that god still dominates our collective intellectual reasoning, it might well be a message we should staple to our foreheads.

'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy is published by Picador.

17 March 2007

australianrules.com.au

Disclaimer