The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
(Picador)
The Pesthouse
by Jim Crace
(Picador)
The imaginary of some contemporary writing about America paints a dystopian picture of post-industrial and post-apocalyptic humans plagued by pestilence, famine and perfidy. The east is no longer the harbinger of morning light; America has become the least safe place on Earth. Robber bands roam the countryside preying on waves of desperate migrants fleeing the heartland and making for the coast.
Cormac McCarthy addresses this nightmare scenario in The Road, a chronicle of the journey taken by a father and his young son through a burnt-out America. Dusks and dawns are long and grey, rivers are grey sludge; this is ”a blackened jackstraw land”.
The boy and his father have only each other, a cart of food and an old pistol. The horrors they encounter and evade are numerous and awful: once they come upon men and women secreted in a subterranean hellhole, livestock for cannibals.
Everywhere, and for everyone, the road to the coast beckons, but ”out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died”. At one point, an old man avers that extinction is better than such an existence, and inevitable and comforting: ”When we’re all gone at last then there’ll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too.”
Adding impetus to this literary zeitgeist, Jim Crace offers a similarly dystopian world in The Pesthouse. America has become a ”river crossing in the 10-month stretch of land, this sea-to-sea”. The land has become merely the Dreaming Highway to the east coast, in a pointed reversal of history and manifest destiny. It is to the east, out of the west, that a new great trek lumbers and lurches.
Margaret and Franklin become fellow travellers. They meet when he stumbles into the Pesthouse on a rain-sodden night, seeking shelter. Her shaved head alerts him immediately to her condition: she is in the early stages of flux, as the plague is known in this post-lapsarian society without medicine, science and social order.
Cordons sanitaires, forced removal, alienation and co-habitation are staples of Crace’s: in Quarantine, seven people spend a month in the desert, thrown together by fate; one of them is a wanderer named Jesus. Margaret and Franklin must learn to co-exist with others too, and as often evade them.
It is fascinating to read The Road and The Pesthouse as a dialogue about failed post-modern society. At other times they merge stylistically and mesmerically, as when Franklin and Margaret are pursued by remorseless riders: it’s almost as if Crace is giving a nod to McCarthy’s Borderlands trilogy about the end of the West.
Ultimately, and significantly, the writers diverge. Crace is curiously conservative, with Margaret and Franklin knowing their future lies in going westward once again, reclaiming what ”used to be America and would be theirs”.
McCarthy is concerned with more than the human. He acknowledges that certain things cannot be put back and made right again, that before humankind there were older things of greater mystery. As his old man says: ”Things will be better when everybody’s gone.”