This decade's great visionary

There are men who look down at their peacefully sleeping children in the middle of the night and feel safe in the knowledge that all is right with the world. Cormac McCarthy, America's hermitic prophet, now 76, is not one of those men.

When his novel The Road was published in 2006, he described how it had come about thus: "Four or five years ago, my son (John, then aged 3 or 4) and I went to El Paso (in Texas) and we checked into the old hotel there.

"And one night, John was asleep, it was probably about 2 in the morning, and I went over and just stood and looked out the window at this town.

"There was nothing moving but I could hear the trains going through, a very lonesome sound. I just had this image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years ... fires up on the hill and everything being laid to waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy. So I wrote two pages. And then about four years later I realised that it wasn't two pages of a book, it was a book, and it was about that man, and that boy."

That book won McCarthy the Pulitzer prize, among others, and has been variously selected as the greatest novel of the decade now ending. A film version will be released at the uncertain dawn of the decade now beginning, starring Viggo Mortensen as the man and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy.

The Road is, McCarthy has claimed in his rare interviews, a story "about goodness" but, since it features a post-apocalyptic America ruled by vicious cannibalistic tribes and beset by pestilential disease and atmospheric meltdown, this is true only in relation to McCarthy's other books - Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men in particular - where horror and death have no rival.

It has been said in recent days, about the latest failure of the politicians at the Copenhagen summit to agree on a substantial response to the worst nightmares of climate scientists, that they lack the imagination to envisage that future. Perhaps, prior to the summit, they should all have been required to read The Road.

McCarthy, who often seems to be channelling the Old Testament, has no trouble with imagining the worst. The specific event that has drained all colour from his American world and left it reeking of blood and covered in ash, a deforested "scabland", is never detailed in the book, though in the film, by Australian director John Hillcoat's account, it becomes more a tale of "the revenge of nature: we are certainly heightening the environmental threat".

McCarthy spends a lot of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, near his home in New Mexico, a multi-disciplinary institution set up by the Los Alamos physicist Murray Gell-Mann to study "complex systems". McCarthy lunches there and counts a number of the scientists among his friends. When asked recently about the nature of the catastrophic event in The Road, he answered by saying: "I don't have an opinion. It could be anything - volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who've gone diving in Yellowstone lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100ft (30m) high and the whole thing is sort of pulsing. From different people, you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday."

You can't help feeling McCarthy tends toward the latter timeframe. He is the great pessimist of American literature, using his dervish sentences to illuminate a world in which almost everything (including punctuation) has already come to dust. He once argued that he could see no point at all in literature that did not dwell on death. His touchstones are Dostoevsky and Melville.

His morbid visions, however, are so elemental in their telling that they have long won over those who have staked out more nuanced territory. Saul Bellow, peerless observer of the vivid comedy of American hope, sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded McCarthy a MacArthur Fellowship, the "genius grant", and noted his "overpowering ... life-giving and death-dealing sentences".

There is generally no such thing as society in McCarthy's books - or much in the way of family or domesticity - just as there has frequently been none in his adult life. It didn't start out that way: he was the eldest son of an eminent lawyer from East Tennessee. They had a big house, acres of land and servants.

McCarthy rebelled against his father early; he saw no value in school, preferring the dedicated pursuit of his own curiosities. "I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies," he has recalled. "I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was ... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home."

He was kicked out of the University of Tennessee and drifted in and out of jobs for a long time afterwards. He joined the air force for a couple of years and started reading books only when posted to Alaska, where there was little else to do. Though he has married three times, and had two sons, he has spent much of his life on one road or another, living in cheap motels.

He cut his own hair, bathed in lakes and affected the frontiersman stare of the Marion Ettlinger author photographs that were used to sell his books. In an age of American excess, McCarthy carved himself an image as the last Depression-era stoic. "Three moves are as good as a fire," he still says, of his method for dislocation.

Despite making an awkward appearance on Oprah Winfrey's book club for The Road, McCarthy has never had any interest in the "literary world" or even in coming face to face with his readers (he is, perhaps, the man least likely to tweet); he is thus thought of as a cultish outsider with a near-religious following. Like all seers, he comes complete with relics: his clapped-out Olivetti typewriter, on which he has written all of his books, sold earlier this month for $254,000 at auction, 20 times its estimate.

Though he has dwelt in his writing on unpicking the founding myths of America, and giving them a bloody retelling, he captures, in his person, another of the sustaining archetypes of the nation - namely, that of the resourceful loner, telling it like it is.

Critics of McCarthy, of his King James rhetoric, of his red in tooth and claw masculinity (he can, at times, make Hemingway sound like an ardent feminist), sometimes charge him with being absent from his novels, suggesting they lack any autobiographical stake. The Road, though, is a powerful argument against this view.

On one level, it is a science fiction fantasy of a future hell; it can just as easily be read, however, as this particular (ageing) father's wee-small-hours paranoia for his child, of not being there to protect him from the world.

McCarthy stated in his Wall Street Journal exchange that "a lot of the lines [in The Road] are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. John said, 'Papa, what would you do if I died?' I said, 'I'd want to die, too', and he said, 'So you could be with me?' I said, 'Yes, so I could be with you'. Just a conversation that two guys would have."

With this in mind, you wonder a little about some of the other exchanges that fall to father and son, as they make their hopeless quest across the devastated continent with their shopping trolley of belongings. Hiding from cannibals, the boy, who takes on - in his father's eyes - something of the mantle of humanity's saviour, asks his dad at one point: "We wouldn't ever eat anybody, would we?"

"No. Of course not."

"No matter what?"

"No. No matter what."

"Because we're the good guys."

"Yes."

It may not be much to go on - that maybe some children are born with the instinct not to eat other humans in extremis - but that is where McCarthy places his hope. "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed," he believes. "The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."

THE McCARTHY LOWDOWN

Born
1933, on Rhode Island, US, the third of six children. Changed his name from Charles to Cormac after the Irish king. Attended a Catholic school in Knoxville, Tennessee, and twice dropped out of the University of Tennessee.

Best of times
In 1981, following a recommendation by Saul Bellow, McCarthy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant ($236,000) which he described as "the most profound experience of my life". A decade later, his book All The Pretty Horses propelled him from cult writer to international bestseller. In 2007 McCarthy won the Pulitzer prize for The Road; the following year, the film adaptation of his previous novel No Country For Old Men won four Oscars.

Worst of times
Until he received the MacArthur grant, McCarthy lived in relative obscurity, barely scratching a living from his first five novels, despite critical acclaim.

He says
"Most people don't ever see anyone die. It used to be if you grew up in a family you saw everybody die. Death is the major issue in the world. It just is."

They say
"By his single-minded commitment to his work and apparent indifference to the rewards and aggrandisements quite openly pursued by the rest of us, he puts most other American writers to shame."- Vanity Fair, 2005

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