A Book of a Lifetime: Joseph Boyden on 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy

'There is a tenderness that haunts the whole book'

As a writer, one of the more difficult questions I’m asked is if I have a favourite novel.

How do you choose just one? I’ve been amazed and shaken and obsessed by so many books that have impacted me in different ways: finding my older sister’s copy of The Outsiders when I was 12 years old and then consuming it in a fever for two days straight, on the final page making the realisation that I desperately needed to become a novelist; discovering Jack Kerouac’s On the Road at age 16 and again becoming so obsessed with it that I myself hit the road for the next decade in my quest to write before I managed to settle down a little bit. But if I must decide on one book that has haunted me the most in these last ten years, it is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy is never an easy read. His sombre and dramatic and delirious language, his characters’ propensity for bad, bad decisions, hell, even his refusal to use standard punctuation when it comes to dialogue, have always marked him as a literary outsider, a truly rebellious voice in the American tradition of what are too often fake rebel yells. But The Road, for me, marked a turning point for McCarthy. Despite its brutal onslaught, its deeply dark and desperate journey of a father and son through post-apocalyptic America, there’s a tenderness in this one that haunts the whole book. It’s a father’s dual desire to at once save his boy and teach him as quickly as possible what he’ll need to know in the almost assured event that they’ll become forever separated that’s the heartbeat of this book.

Near the end of the novel, a snippet of dialogue between son and father:

Do you remember that little boy, Papa?

Yes, I remember him.

Do you think he’s all right that little boy?

Oh yes. I think he’s all right.

Do you think he was lost?

No, I don’t think he was lost.

I’m scared that he was lost.

I think he’s all right.

But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find the little boy?

Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.

At once tragic and uplifting and brutal and redemptive, this novel is the novel that made me reconsider my relationship with my own son, that made me reconsider my relationship with my own writing, that at the same time opened my eyes and filled them with tears as I read, rattled then shocked then finally resolute, all the time perched on the edge of my chair.

Joseph Boyden’s novel, ‘The Orenda’, is published by Oneworld