Cormac McCarthy's The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Manu Larcenet Review

A dying man and his young son walk a blighted landscape littered with the mass dead, dodging roaming cannibals and surviving on whatever they can find, heading south, to the coast. Will they make it there alive - and what is at the end of the road?

Manu Larcenet’s comics adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is everything I was told the novel was but I found wasn’t. I didn’t enjoy McCarthy’s novel at all. I remember awkward, obtuse similes on nearly every page - to a comedic point - and poorly structured dialogue between underdeveloped characters leading to baffling conversations where you didn’t know who was saying what (it didn’t help that McCarthy didn’t use speech marks or character names or “he said” to make it easier either). That’s what I recall of the novel anyway - it’s been many years since I read it and I’m not about to re-read it anytime soon either.

Larcenet’s rendering of McCarthy’s dark tale is much clearer and, in stripping back the weak prose, exposes the simple power of the story. That is, that, for a parent, it’s not the end of the world so long as your child is alive, even in the literal post-apocalypse - only if they die is it the end.

I’m familiar with Larcenet’s comics, which is why the first thing that struck me about this book is how unexpectedly amazing the art is. I’d read his Back to Basics series a while back (written by Jean-Yves Ferri, the current Asterix writer), which is a very gentle, slice-of-life Sunday Funnies-style comic that looks like this:

And this is what his artwork looks like in this book:

It’s like another artist drew this book! The depth of his talent is incredible. Every page is intricately detailed. He also takes care to include the grimy perma-ash of this horrific new world in each panel which only adds to the feeling of dread and misery the characters are put through in the story.

And it’s a helluva story. The two struggle ever onward, rarely catching a break, often facing setbacks, utterly saturated in the never-ending paranoia of this terrible new world. Long before the end I felt as weary as the characters do after just a few scenes, and they’re the ones doing it while carrying supplies, sleeping rough, and all on an empty stomach!

The character work is really beautiful. Small moments like the son making sure his dad eats as much as he does, rather than accepting it all - the boy really does have to grow up much sooner than he should. But you catch glimpses of his youth when he sees another child in a city, or when he hears a dog barking, and he lights up at the prospect of a friend his own age or a pet. Other times, he keeps his dad human by making him give an older, broken down man a jar of preserves that they also badly need - ensuring his dad stays a “good guy” and not like the savages hunting them.

And it is a bleak, bleak environment the two travel through. Not just the ruins of civilisation and the general lack of life but the nightmarish things locked in cellars, the things strung up everywhere, and the way this setting changes the characters’ behaviours. Like the casual brutality of the father showing his son how to blow his brains out with their last bullet if the worst comes to worst.

It’s reflected in the art too with the characters sometimes having the same black, empty eyes of a dead fish, as if what they’ve lived through has made them non-human, or the way the characters’ faces sometimes look skeletal and corpse-like as if they’re already dead.

The one criticism I’ll give it is that I’m really tired of dystopian/post-apocalyptic stories. The number of comparisons you could make - the thousands of dystopian movies/shows/games/comics that already exist - show you how played out this genre is, and I find it generally a very unimaginative and one-note concept. Larcenet handles these aspects well but they’re also unavoidably derivative. I think it’s too easy to be pessimistic about the future. Not that new sci-fi should be as hopefully utopian as mid-20th century sci-fi was, but I’d like to see stories that aren’t quite so abjectly negative - some creative nuance would be better.

Manu Larcenet’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is one of those rare occasions where the adaptation surpasses the original material, as celebrated as it is. Larcenet doesn’t just tell a solid dystopian/survival story but a meaningful and moving father/son story as well, one with a palpable heart, and with consistently impressive art as well. If you’re thinking of reading The Road, out of the incarnations available - novel, movie, comic - the comic is the best version to experience.