The Road Not Taken

The movie version of No Country for Old Men was my first contact with Cormac McCarthy's work. The last words of the film were powerful, the dream of the love between father and son in a world where such love doesn't seem likely to exist, told in a time where the evil of men was oppressive. This symmetry seemed iron cast for a worthy story, and so I bought The Road, of which was called McCarthy's most accessible work. The Road is a book, in that it cannot be anything else. It jumps between action and thought without seam, containing nothing but the insular projection of father and son. Dialog goes without quotations and recedes into the rest of the text, and time and place seem to be abolished as the reader floats through the world without reason or explanation. It has the sensation of peeling away some one's mind and observing their layers of thought from above, wonderfully random and unhinged. You might be treated to a flashback one moment and an action piece the next.

The vituperative world is relayed through exact and technical descriptions (for instance, stone "flues"), and he delivers evocative metaphors and strings of thought that stand strong amongst the isolation of the world that he has created. His style is unique and transformative, turning docile words into powerful and emotional beasts. Standard rules of grammar are trivial in McCarthy's world. Such things as a comma are intended to shield common clusters of thought so that they are understandable while being conveyed. But McCarthy organizes his thoughts in such a way that there is never any confusion.

With the movie arriving later this year, I think that this will be an interesting experiment to assess what can be culled from the ashes of a book that relies on the strengths of a written medium through and through. Books stylistically diverge from one another in both voice and detail. McCarthy is aware that you will come to know the characters better by the resonance of their nightmares than you will by their names. The Road is such a beautiful piece of literature because the writing is so transportive and the language is so eloquent in the crudeness and the brutality that seeks to emancipate hope from father and son.

But the film will have to rely on visuals and editing, and the hazy vision that McCarthy has presented will ring with a little more clarity. I think that there is strength in ignorance. I'm not sure if I want things to be patched together. Details in The Road pass by at arms length along the panorama, but it is seldom certain. A flashback to some dialog might have happened sometime and somewhere, and it is the uncertainty that makes it so fleeting in a world of lurid despotism on the brink of total despair. It is not up to us to know.

I said that The Road cannot be anything else but a book, and I meant that only in its present form. The movie will of course take the basic form of the story and make a film out of it, relying on all of the conventions of a film, and what will come out on the other side will be a very different take on the same familiar story. I don't think that should be disparaged. Instead, it should be nurtured along and encouraged. McCarthy's work is exhaustive and breathtaking, but it cannot be all things, and the movie will hopefully provide something that the book is not.