In a soft voice, chuckling frequently and gazing intently with his grey-green eyes, McCarthy talked about his latest book, The Road, sharing his views on ageing, writing and technology. As the afternoon chat went on, it got dark and the discussion moved to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Dressed in crisp jeans and dimpled brown cowboy boots, McCarthy began with a Bombay Sapphire Gibson — onions, up.

The 76-year-old author first broke through with his 1985 novel Blood Meridian, a tale of American mercenaries hunting Indians in the Mexican borderland. Commercial success came in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses, a winner of the US National Book Award and the first instalment of the Border Trilogy. Critics relished his detailed vision of the West, his painterly descriptions of violence and his muscular prose stripped of most punctuation.

The writer himself, however, has proved more elusive. He won’t be found at book festivals, readings and other places where novelists gather. McCarthy prefers hanging out with “smart people” outside his field, such as professional poker players and the thinkers at the Santa Fe Institute, a theoretical science foundation in New Mexico where he has been a longtime Fellow.

In recent years his circle has inched farther into Hollywood. Now, set for release in January, is a screen adaptation of The Road. As intimate as it is grim, the book tells the story of a man’s bond with his young son as the two struggle for survival years after a cataclysm has erased society. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and was promoted heavily by Oprah Winfrey as a surprising selection for her book club.

The film, starring Viggo Mortensen as the father and Kodi Smit-McPhee (11 years old at the time of filming) as his son, closely follows the book’s bleak narrative, including encounters with cannibals. The director, John Hillcoat, is an Australian who made the 2005 Western-style revenge tale The Proposition, set in the Outback. To replicate the blighted landscapes in The Road, Hillcoat shot much of the movie in wintertime Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where remnants of the region’s coal and steel history lent to the desolation.

The backstory of McCarthy’s novel is personal, springing from his relationship with his son, John, 11, who he had with his third wife, Jennifer. As death bears down in The Road, the main character obsessively protects his son and prepares him to carry on alone: “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God, God never spoke.”

John Jurgensen: What kind of reactions have you had to The Road from fathers?

Cormac McCarthy: I have the same letter from about six different people. One from Australia, one from Germany, one from England — but they all said the same thing. They said: “I started reading your book after dinner and I finished it 3.45 the next morning and I got up and went upstairs and I got my kids up and I just sat there in the bed and held them.”

Why don’t you sign copies of The Road?

There are signed copies of the book, but they all belong to my son John, so when he turns 18 he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever. No, those are the only signed copies of the book.

How many did you have?

Two hundred and fifty. So occasionally I get letters from book dealers or whoever that say, “I have a signed copy of the The Road”, and I say, “No. You don’t.”

You were born in Rhode Island and grew up in the South. Why did you end up in the Southwest?

I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject. And it was.

You grew up Irish Catholic I did, a bit.

It wasn’t a big issue. We went to church on Sunday. I don’t remember religion ever even being discussed.

Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in The Road questions and curses?

It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the [Santa Fe] Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart”. And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.

When you discussed making The Road into a movie with [the director] John Hillcoat, did he press you on what had caused the disaster in the story?

A lot of people ask me. I don’t have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I’m with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteorite to them. But 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 there that is now about 100ft high and the whole thing is just 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. No one knows.

What kind of things make you worry?

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realise that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognisable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It’s more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it’s just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there’s a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

When you first went to the film set, how did it compare with how you saw The Road in your head?

I guess my notion of what was going on in The Road did not include 60 to 80 people and a bunch of cameras. [The director] Dick Pearce and I made a film in North Carolina about 30 years ago [The Gardener’s Tale] and I thought, “This is just hell. Who would do this?” Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.

But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared with the solitary job of writing?

Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

All the Pretty Horses was also turned into a film [starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz]. Were you happy with the way it came out?

It could’ve been better. As it stands today it could be cut and made into a pretty good movie. The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can’t do that. You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released he would have to cut it down to two hours.

Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

For modern readers, yeah. People apparently read only mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written 100 years ago are just not going to be written any more and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like The Brothers Karamazov or Moby-Dick, go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

How does the notion of ageing and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

Your future gets shorter and you recognise that. In recent years I’ve had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to take a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

Does getting older make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

I’m not interested in writing short stories. If it doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide, it hardly seems worth doing.

Can you tell me about the book you’re working on, in terms of story or setting?

I’m not very good at talking about this stuff. It’s mostly set in New Orleans around 1980. It has to do with a brother and sister. When the book opens she’s already committed suicide, and it’s about how he deals with it. She’s an interesting girl.

Some of your critics focus on how rarely you go deep with female characters.

This long book is largely about a young woman. There are interesting scenes that cut in throughout the book, all dealing with the past. She’s committed suicide about seven years before. I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

The past five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing?

I don’t think there’s any rich period or fallow period. That’s just a perception you get from what’s published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying breadcrumbs. Someone asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote. And she said: “Because I was good at it.” And I think that’s the right answer. If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.” And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.

This is an edited version of an interview first published in The Wall Street Journal

AN EXTRACT FROM ‘THE ROAD’

On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadowlands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned. Farther along were billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered. At the top of the hill they stood in the cold and the wind, getting their breath. He looked at the boy. I’m all right, the boy said. The man put his hand on his shoulder and nodded toward the open country below them. He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste. Nothing to see. No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes. Of course you can. The boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you see? the man said. Nothing. He lowered the glasses. It’s raining. Yes, the man said. I know.

They left the cart in a gully covered with the tarp and made their way up the slope through the dark poles of the standing trees to where he’d seen a running ledge of rock and they sat under the rock overhang and watched the gray sheets of rain blow across the valley. It was very cold. They sat huddled together wrapped each in a blanket over their coats and after a while the rain stopped and there was just the dripping in the woods.

When it had cleared they went down to the cart and pulled away the tarp and got their blankets and the things they would need for the night. They went back up the hill and made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him. Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless dark come to enshroud them. The gray shape of the city vanished in the night’s onset like an apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back out of the wind. Then they walked out to the road and he took the boy’s hand and they went to the top of the hill where the road crested and where they could see out over the darkening country to the south, standing there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets, watching for any sign of a fire or a lamp. There was nothing. The lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more than a mote of light and after a while they walked back. Everything too wet to make a fire. They ate their poor meal cold and lay down in their bedding with the lamp between them. He’d brought the boy’s book but the boy was too tired for reading. Can we leave the lamp on till I’m asleep? he said. Yes. Of course we can.

He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian. Can I ask you something? he said.

Yes. Of course.

Are we going to die?

Sometime. Not now.

And we’re still going south.

Yes.

So we’ll be warm.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay what?

Nothing. Just okay.

Go to sleep.

Okay.

I’m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?

Yes. That’s okay.

And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?

Yes. Of course you can.

What would you do if I died?

If you died I would want to die too.

So you could be with me?

Yes. So I could be with you.

Okay.

by Cormac McCarthy. © M-71, Ltd. 2006

Interview by John Jurgensen , The Times Nov 2009