Why Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Is In My Top 5 Novels

By Dr Francesca Haig

1. I think it deals with the really important and pressing issue of massive environmental destruction. While most critics agree that the novel itself probably depicts a sudden catastrophic natural event, like the eruption of the massive volcano under the Yellowstone national park, which will basically screw the world if it blows (and this fits with hints that McCarthy himself has given, and his lifelong passion for science/geology), the fact is that it’s easy to read it in lots of ways: nuclear destruction or just environmental catastrophe (global warming), which are genuine and crucial issues.

2. It asks big questions: compassion vs. survival; individual vs. community. It forces us to imagine ourselves in that scenario: what would you do?

3. It moves me, hugely. I know it’s been accused of being sentimental or mannered, but the relationship between father and son is such a beacon of hope/tenderness in the bleak world of the novel. The scene where the father dies makes me cry (literally) every single time. The fact that the novel doesn’t shy away from this loving, tender relationship, at the same time as it doesn’t hesitate to show the absolute worst of human nature, seems quite courageous to me.

4. The stark, stripped-back writing impresses me hugely. It impressed me even more once I’d read most of McCarthy’s other stuff, and realised how different The Road is from his normal style. While it shares the difficult vocabulary, violence, harshness of his other novels, the prose style is so different. McCarthy is famous, in his other novels, for his long sentences, which have been described as ‘baroque’. But in The Road the language itself is stripped back to these blunt, abrupt sentences – for me it’s a beautiful example of form enhancing/reflecting content. It depicts a broken world, and in the novel language itself is broken.

5. One important reason is personal: I’ve got a long-standing research interest in trauma narratives – my top 5 contemporary novels also include one novel about the Holocaust (Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels, 1996) and one about slavery (Beloved, Toni Morrison, 1987). Usually, my research (including my PhD) has focused on historical traumas (especially the Holocaust), and the ethical and aesthetic difficulties of how we can (or even should) express these unspeakable events in language. What interests me is that The Road is a projected future trauma, rather than a historical one, but it displays many of the same features as those other trauma narratives I’ve been studying for years.

6. The other reasons are subjective, and difficult to quantify. The novel sticks in my head. I find it memorable in the way that only the best texts are. It makes me want to re-read it again and again. It makes me want to give copies to all my friends, and force them to read it.

Citation:
Francesca Haig, ‘Why Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Is In My Top 5 Novels’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers, www.notesonliteraturechester.blogspot.co.uk [accessed Day Month Year].

About the Author:
Dr Francesca Haig is Visiting Writing Fellow, Department of English, University of Chester. She teaches periodically on BA (Hons) Creative Writing, MA Creative Writing: Writing and Publishing Fiction, and MA Modern and Contemporary Fiction.

Francesca is the critically acclaimed author of the post-apocalyptic Fire Sermon trilogy. The first novel, The Fire Sermon, was published in 2015, followed by The Map of Bones in 2016. The series concluded with The Forever Ship (2017).