When all the clocks have stopped

A great many unspeakable things happen in the course of Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant, distressing new novel. But the worst, the most unspeakable, has already taken place. We are not told precisely what that thing was. McCarthy is content to leave it ill-defined (‘a dull rose glow in the window-glass’ at 1.17am, when the clocks stopped forever), since his story gains its charge from a narrow focus on the desperate efforts of a man and his son to stay alive. But it quickly becomes clear that the two are living in the aftermath of a nuclear cataclysm.

By now, years after the event, the earth is a cruel parody of its former self. Nothing grows, the air tastes of ash, the ground itself has been ‘cauterised’. ‘The banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.’

McCarthy describes the overall human situation in just a few scattered paragraphs. From these we learn that there are relatively few survivors. Food has all but run out. Lawless gangs roam the countryside carrying chains fitted with ‘every manner of bludgeon’, pillaging, raping, murdering. They keep slaves and catamites. Cannibalism is rife. Things, in short, could not be worse.

The prose has a condensed, crunching, rhythmic feel, like footfall on gravel. This exactly suits the tenor of the story, which contracts around the relationship between the boy and his father. The two are constantly on the move. The boy, who was born just days after the cataclysm, has ‘great staring eyes’ and ‘candle-coloured skin’. He is alarmingly thin. In response to one particularly horrific encounter, the man has to watch him ‘doing his little dance of terror’, and the image is difficult to push away.

The father himself coughs blood. We watch him holding the shivering boy in the ‘cold autistic dark’, counting ‘each frail breath in the blackness’.