Updated August 28, 2007

Cormac McCarthy’s recently published novel, The Road, is an Oprah’s Book Club selection and recently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This was a bit surprising given The Road’s somewhat grim, un-Oprah setting and spare dialogue. Although it has strong overtones of Pluto in Capricorn—which I’ll discuss in a moment—it is really a moving pilgrimage of love. The road in the novel is an existential metaphor for life, given meaning by its being surrounded by death. The two main characters in the novel, a father and son (both nameless as befits the universal quality of the story), are survivors of a cataclysm which has plunged the world into something resembling a nuclear winter. The story is also set during the seasonal winter and there are references to “the longest night of the year” and the shortness of the days—all contributing to the Capricorn winter solstice tone.

The man and his son engage in terse, laconic, spare dialogue which sounds at times like the conversations between Valdimir and Estragon in another Everyman work of literature, Waiting for Godot--although there is no comic vaudeville relief in The Road.

Astrologically, I was most struck with the descriptions of the landscape and the sky, including the luminaries. These descriptions sometimes poetically allude to the Sun and Moon in Greek mythology.

What makes this book bearable amidst all the devastation—including scenes of Holocaust-like brutality—is the sustaining love between father and son. It elevates the book into something much more than a bleak tale of humanity’s grey and ash-strewn end times. What sustains us is love and "love's austere and lonely offices" (to borrow a line from Robert Hayden's poem, "Those Winter Sundays"). Strewn throughout the book are references to acts like anointment—when, for example, the father gently washes the blood of another from his son’s face and hair. There is in Capricorn a highly spiritual potential and this book illuminates that narrow gateway, although it is in essence a book about the absence of any god other than Love.

The Road is really much more about Scorpio, I think, in its portrayal of how love can be deep, beyond words, shared, and survive even the coldest of snow. And perhaps Taurus, too, in the novel's theme of love which can shoulder any burden. It may speak especially to the generation of those born with Pluto in Scorpio.