Book review: The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, by Cormac McCarthy and Manu Larcenet

reviewed by Luke C. Jackson

 Cormac McCarthy and Manu Larcenet. The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation. Abrams ComicArts, 2024. US $26.99. ISBN:  9781419776779. https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/the-road-a-graphic-novel-adaptation

The Road, released by Cormac McCarthy in 2006, was a publishing sensation, winning several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. In 2009, it was adapted as a film, starring Viggo Mortensen and directed by John Hillcoat. Now, for the first time, the novel has been adapted as a graphic novel, by French writer/illustrator Manu Larcenet, with the blessings of its creator. Larcenet is known for his work on several comics series, including Cosmonauts of the Future, written by Lewis Trondheim, and Ordinary Victories, which Larcenet wrote and drew. But it is his series Blast that most clearly foreshadows his work on The Road, with its more contemplative pacing, its white spaces, and its silence.

In the endpapers to The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, the reader is presented with a letter, written by Larcenet to Cormack McCarthy. Entitled ‘A plea for The Road’, it represents Larcenet’s attempt to convince the famous author to allow him to adapt his novel. In this letter, he promises that, if he does so, he will ‘not rewrite anything, or change the feel of the story’. Instead, he sought to ‘draw [McCarthy’s] words.’ We cannot know what, in particular, appealed to McCarthy about Larcenet’s plea. Perhaps it was his impressive experience as both a writer and illustrator, his evident humility, or his clear love for the novel. But it is easy to see the throughline from McCarthy’s novel to Larcenet’s adaptation in Larcenet’s claim that ‘I draw violence and kindness.’ This is a story of violence – of murder, and rape, and cannibalism; and of kindness – of charity, and occasional laughter, and the bonds between people brought together by tragic circumstance.

‘You have to carry the fire.’ With these words, an unnamed father communicates his son’s purpose to him. They are the words that drive the narrative forward. The fire that this father speaks of is the belief that the next day is worth living, no matter what it brings. This is a belief that the boy’s mother could not sustain. Her suicide preceded the journey of father and son down The Road. Where they are going is only half-clear. There is the vague promise of the South. Perhaps, if they walk far enough in that direction, they can put the scourge of nuclear fallout behind them. And yet, as they trudge across the landscape, they have embarked on not one journey but two. The second, and more important, is forged not on foot but through the boy’s naïve questions, through his father’s thoughtful responses, and through their long, companionable silences. For the father, the stakes are clear: if his son dies, the world dies. Comparisons with the Christ story are unavoidable, and the temptation to render emotional moments with bombastic sentimentality must have been compelling, yet Larcenet never falls into that trap.

Against backgrounds of grey, brown and beige, his gritty linework stands in stark relief. Litter, ash and dust appear to swirl constantly around the characters and, by extension, around the page, at times almost obscuring the action. Rendered in this way, the remains of buildings and the leafless trees are interchangeable, while skeletons comingle with detritus, forming a landscape that is part-rubble, part-biological, everything dead or dying. The demarcations that once separated people along socio-cultural and political lines are now moot in the face of mass displacement. Presented without chapter breaks, the story is unrelenting, as events representing days, weeks, possibly months, merge into one another. Flipping back and forth through the book produces a kaleidoscopic effect, with one moment nearly indistinguishable from another, and cause and effect meaningless. It is only by pausing on a moment that its import can be fully appreciated.

Exhibiting an admirable combination of artistic bravura and restraint, Larcenet’s graphic novel adaptation perfectly embodies the quiet, profound poetry of McCarthy’s tale. It is a tale that might be viewed either as an elegy to a dying world, or – through its insistence on the resilience of love and hope in the face of Armageddon – as a new Genesis.