Paperback, 256 pages
Published Nov. 11, 2006 by vintage International.
Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods.
Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. The boy and his father …
Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods.
Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. The boy and his father hope to avoid the marauders, reach a milder climate, and perhaps locate some remnants of civilization still worthy of that name. They possess only what they can scavenge to eat, and the rags they wear and the heat of their own bodies are all the shelter they have. A pistol with only a few bullets is their only defense besides flight. Before them the father pushes a shopping cart filled with blankets, cans of food and a few other assets, like jars of lamp oil or gasoline siphoned from the tanks of abandoned vehicles—the cart is equipped with a bicycle mirror so that they will not be surprised from behind.
Through encounters with other survivors brutal, desperate or pathetic, the father and son are both hardened and sustained by their will, their hard-won survivalist savvy, and most of all by their love for each other. They struggle over mountains, navigate perilous roads and forests reduced to ash and cinders, endure killing cold and freezing rainfall. Passing through charred ghost towns and ransacking abandoned markets for meager provisions, the pair battle to remain hopeful. They seek the most rudimentary sort of salvation. However, in The Road, such redemption as might be permitted by their circumstances depends on the boy’s ability to sustain his own instincts for compassion and empathy in opposition to his father’s insistence upon their mutual self-interest and survival at all physical and moral costs.
The Road was the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. ([source][1])
Walk, push a cart, "I'm hungry.", look for food, "be careful," hide, walk more.
Bleak is okay with me. Boring is not. Points for style, though.
McCarthy, like every great and lesser author, has been writing essentially the same story over and over again. Except that he almost always finds a way to re-write it in a fresh, dark, and deep manner. His story is the tale of the wandering in the desert of the spirit, so to speak. He pares everything away that is false and illusory in the world to its primal and violent begetting. He writes of the ascetic journey of this stripping away of the surface world, and in most of his books one of his characters ends up on a physical equivalent of this journey, up in the mountains or Mexican desert, wandering with nothing but the direction of their instinct and a sense of immutable loss.
Here, in The Road, McCarthy has taken this essential thread of all of his stories and laid it out bare-boned and shining with his …
McCarthy, like every great and lesser author, has been writing essentially the same story over and over again. Except that he almost always finds a way to re-write it in a fresh, dark, and deep manner. His story is the tale of the wandering in the desert of the spirit, so to speak. He pares everything away that is false and illusory in the world to its primal and violent begetting. He writes of the ascetic journey of this stripping away of the surface world, and in most of his books one of his characters ends up on a physical equivalent of this journey, up in the mountains or Mexican desert, wandering with nothing but the direction of their instinct and a sense of immutable loss.
Here, in The Road, McCarthy has taken this essential thread of all of his stories and laid it out bare-boned and shining with his hardened poetry. He couldn't have done it any better. It would appear, at a surface level, that he writes out of the depths of despair and pessimism. But look deeper, and you uncover the vast depth of human warmth and spiritual yearning that underlies this simple story of a brutal, bereft and shattered world in which a father and son struggle, seemingly meaninglessly, to survive against all odds. This is a story not about a post-apocalyptic world, but about love and the bonds of humanity that take us beyond bestiality.
McCarthy, I feel, is the kind of author best read with a glass of whiskey and the growl of William Eliott Whitmore playing in the background. Timeless, tough, with a heart of beautiful granite. This is the work of a master.
The ending was a little pat. I preferred All the Pretty Horses, since I like my apocalypse stories full of zombies or populated by women who have seized power.
Good, but maybe not worth all the hype that it's been getting. Not (at least for me) the powerful, life-changing story that I expected from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Bleak, but not unremittingly so.
