Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The Road is such a powerful story. You have this utterly bleak scenario and it is incredible how he draws on this limited palette of blackness and ash and coldness and snow. There is virtually nothing to hold on to. But then against this situation you have the father and the son, and the novel builds up this incredibly emotive relationship. Not least because you see the sacrifices the father has to make in terms of what it means to be human to protect his son.
Your first book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
I am a huge Cormac McCarthy fan. I would go so far as to say that I consider him the best living writer. The Road isn’t actually my all-time favourite McCarthy book. That would be Blood Meridian which is an apocalyptic Western in which a band of desperados are hired to go to Mexico to kill Indians and they become this rampaging massacring army and it is scene after scene of surreal and endless violence.
But The Road is such a powerful story. You have this utterly bleak scenario and it is incredible how he draws on this limited palette of blackness and ash and coldness and snow. There is virtually nothing to hold on to. But then against this situation you have the father and the son, and the novel builds up this incredibly emotive relationship. Not least because you see the sacrifices the father has to make in terms of what it means to be human to protect his son. He has to be ruthless because everything has regressed back to a brutal kill or be killed state of nature. But the son retains some humanity.
There is a bit where someone tries to steal their cart full of stuff and they stop him and the father makes this man take off all his clothes and confiscates the guy’s clothes and they walk off and leave him, knowing he will obviously die. And the son is saying, ‘Why did we have to do that?’ And the dad explains, ‘We had to, otherwise he would have done it to us by taking our things.’
But the love the father has for the son and the son’s innate humanity are the two glimmers of hope which endure through the book. It is one of those devastating books which by the time you finish it leaves you numb and changed. I think McCarthy has looked very hard and honestly at the most difficult questions anyone can face about the meaning of life and he has extracted this kind, wonderful, powerful, unforgettable story from it.
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Dr James Miller has published a number of academic articles about African-American literature, Civil Rights and the 1960s counter-culture. He lectured in American literature at King’s College London and currently teaches creative writing at London’s South Bank University. He has been fascinated by apocalyptic novels from an early age. His new book, Sunshine State, is set in a futuristic world destroyed by climate change and the resulting economic breakdown. As a child Miller believed that if he had clean water, tinned food, medical equipment and a rifle he could survive nuclear war. But Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel on nuclear war smashed that belief. ‘We lived just outside London and I would often sit there thinking, are we just far enough away not to be vaporised when they vaporise London?’
