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.