10 of 11 members found this review helpful.
“The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of those books that once you finish it, you toss it down and say "Okay, gonna kill myself now!" It is also riveting, engaging, and beautifully written, so it's worth it.
The hook is pretty simple: A man and his son (both unnamed for the duration of the book) are following a road West in the wake of some world searing apocalypse (also unnamed and tantalizingly undiscussed). Things are bleak. Really bleak, with the land bereft of nearly all plant and animal life. Besides the occasional scavenger like the Man and the Boy who fend off starvation by hunting for hidden caches of food left over from the past, gangs of cannibalistic marauders hunt their fellow men and women as one of the last sources of food. Giant firestorms also occasionally flash through the landscape, but in general it's always cold and dark and hopeless. But the Man and the Boy plod on, weighed down by constant misery and fear because it's all they can do.
Really, if the only thing McCarthy was aiming to do with this book is to create a tone of fear, hopelessness, and misery, then he succeeded better than anyone I've ever seen. You feel REALLY bad for these two travelers, and you feel their despair. They're constantly in danger, be it either from cannibals, starvation, or freezing to death. So on one level it's a straight up and powerful adventure (or, if you prefer, horror) story.
But McCarthy manages to do more than just that. He also builds in messages about blind perseverance and survival, and how those traits take form for better or worse depending on whether they're tempered by other traits, like mercy or trust. The Man is bent on survival, and is thus reluctant to help or even associate the scant few other travelers they meet. He sees them as a threat and a drain on their meager stores when they're already faced with almost certain starvation. He is, in short, instinctively slogging along path to survival that takes him straight through cruelty. The Boy, on the other hand, still retains some of his innocence and the basic human need to comfort, help, and band together with others no matter the personal cost. Yet he is subservient to the Man and unable to act on these drives. Taken together, it's a great examination of the competing human drives to both alienate and include others as a means of survival. I won't tell you which wins out (or if, in fact, both fail), because the resolution of this conflict is probably the most powerful moment in an already moving novel. You should read it for yourself.
It's also worth noting how much I like McCarthy's prose. I can see how some people may get annoyed with him given the liberties he takes with basics like punctuation and sentence structure, but on the whole I thought that the prose was lyrical, elegant, flowing, and very much a part of the whole experience. While it's generally pared down and minimal (the book is well under 300 pages), it didn't bother me as much as say Hemmingway. It just flowed better, and in this case seemed right since this was (on the surface, anyway) a small story about two people fighting to survive in a bleak and largely featureless and barren world.
So, it's not an upbeat book by any stretch but I liked it. Quite a bit.”
