The Road - A Review

Monday, April 28, 2008

What an amazing book
Malach just last night finished reading The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. The Road has won numerous accolades, not only from Oprah, but also a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; they are also making a film of it. From the man who penned No Country for Old Men, The Road is about a father and son journeying across a a landscaped blasted by some unnamed implied nuclear cataclysm years before. A Father and Son journey the former United States where civilization has been pretty much destroyed, along with most life. What is left of humanity is rat tag bands of cannibals, and refugees, who attempt to survive this ashen and cold landscape, scavenging what they can from the ruins of society.

Ash covers much of the Earth and obscures the Sun. All plant life and animals seem to be dead or extremely rare. Oceans and rivers seem devoid of any life. Any life even humanity is rare, and one can go for weeks without seeing another person. Life is so bad, some people are eating each other, even to the point of having children to eat them.

The unnamed Father is literate, very knowledgeable and well read, and mechanically inclined, has has passed this on to his 10 year old unnamed son. The Father decides he and the son will not survive another winter where they are, so they head South, in an aim to reach warmer climates, if there are any left in the world; largely following highways. The journey's threats to the duo's survival create an atmosphere of suppressed terror and tension I have never gotten reading another book.

The Father is constantly coughing up blood, and he knows he is dying. He struggles to protect his boy from the elements, attack, starvation, and mental health. He also tries to protect the boy from what he sees as a dangerous desire to help those they meet along the way. They carry one pistol, with two bullets (meant to commit suicide as opposed to being captured as food), the Father struggles keeping them alive, and with his decision to kill his son if need be to prevent him from suffering a more terrible fate - many of these fates they meet and see along the journey.

They face all these obstacles themselves, they have each other. The Man who is the solid rock of truth and logic, the boy who holds real faith, and core ethics of humanity. They repeatedly assure themselves that they "are the good guys" and to that end they will not do some of the things, more of the wild people of the world will do to survive. Not to give away too much of the ending, they head south for months, surviving as best they can, seeking their salvation.

This book absolutely blew me away. I read it in about a week, and had trouble putting it down. It is filled with such tension; tension I have never felt in a book. You are right there feeling the pain, the cold, the ash in the lungs. You genuinely fear for the duo, and cry when awful things happen to them, and scream with joy when good things occur. They book itself lends a lot of symbolic religious allegory, especially to the New Testament, but you can read other reviews for that.

The writing itself is beautifully sparse. It is very hard to describe how it is written. It is written mostly narratively, and most of the book is sparse dialogue between the Father and Son. It is more like a poem that a written narrative. Very easy to read, while still being very deep. It will be very interesting to see how the remake this book for film. I highly recommend this book. If you only read one book, read this one.

I am Malach, and I am very impressed