domenica 7 febbraio 2010

 

But this is, above all, a love story: of the love between a father and son who embark on a journey with the vaguest of destinations (“the coast”, “the south”) driven by nothing but the idea that their existence must mean something. There is not an ounce of sentimentality. The father, in the end, loves nobody but his son. The boy loves everybody because he has not come to sense. Love, where it exists, is all there is, and the love of a father for his child is the purest, most functional thing in the world.

 

The ending, yes, is slightly different from the book, but only in delivery, not meaning. It’s a less “godly” ending than McCarthy’s, but the visual shock of a particular instant is so powerful as to render it an improvement.

 

The day before I saw it, having foolishly forgotten that the Irish media are interested only in stories of State abuses more than a half-century old, I had again made the mistake of raising the question of my society’s treatment of fathers and children on a radio programme. The inevitable happened: the apparatchiks moved to restore the State’s version. On Tuesday I was contemplating never again uttering a word about the corruption that is family law. Why should I go crazy worrying about other people’s sons?

 

But I went directly to the cinema from meeting a young man, a brilliant though undiscovered poet, who travelled from Cork, in the south of the country, to tell me his heartbreaking story about losing his children to another country because of the corruption and degradation of the Irish State. The same agencies which refused to help him to recover his kidnapped children now tell him that they will enforce any order made against him in the foreign country to which his children have been taken.

 

I am cautioned by State-sponsored ideologues that such stories must be “balanced” by the other side, but I looked in his eyes and saw a man who has known pure evil.

 

The following day he sent me a long poem, containing these lines, which might have been the last of The Road:

 

We came through fields of tall grass

until we reached the seashore

— You walked on water and motioned

for us to follow; You sailed away on song;

You swam out to sea like a dolphin,

while You took to the wind like a gull.

 

 

A version of this article was first published in The Irish Times

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