In another round of The Guardian‘s “Great American Novelist tournament,” Cormac McCarthy’s The Road trumped John Fante’s Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Matthew Spencer pays homage to McCarthy:
[T]here will never be relief in McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world: ‘Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.’ The unnamed man and his son, ‘like pilgrims in a fable’, must travel south in the hope that the winters will be warmer and therefore more survivable. He scavenges for food in abandoned buildings and dwellings ever watchful for traps and bands of marauding cannibals. This novel is a grey suppurating wound. It is frightening and a warning to us all that unsettles and shatters and amazes in equal measure. McCarthy insists that it is a paean to the father and son relationship.
The boy is cast as a redemptive figure, he carries the figurative light of the world. He is forgiving and hopeful and the father is beautifully indulgent of him because he knows that their lives are extremely temporary. These touching moments are interspersed with fraught episodes of jeopardy and shocking violence. There are many references to religion in this hellish world, and to a God that has surely forsaken them, perhaps typical of this southern writer whose style is second to none: part Gothic, part future modern, part Shakespeare (although he does have the punctuation skills of my 5 year-old). Every set piece is brilliant and can be read in isolation like a piece of brutal poetry. ‘He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.’ Mccarthy tells us, we must carry on along the road and protect the feeble spark of life that has roiled and rolled through the millennia. … The Road is a masterpiece, the black yardstick by which every experience, let alone novel, needs to be measured.
The Dish 