The Road (2006)

If you liked the brutal Texas shootouts of No Country For Old Men and the relentless Wild West slaughter of Blood Meridian, this lighthearted tale of a father protecting his son from the ravaged remnants of society in a brutal post-apocalyptic American wasteland will be right up your alley! All the hallmarks of McCarthy are present: gorgeous prose of near-Biblical cadence, constant violence, dialogue without quotation marks, fantastic and surreal landscapes, characters without names... they're here and they're great. There are a lot of subtle touches that make the simple survive-and-protect plot especially effective, like the fact in all their lonely and wanderings across the ruins of the country you never find out where they are, which makes the story take on a much more universal and haunting pallor than it might have otherwise. This is an extremely affecting book that sticks with you for a long time. ( )

A fun and quick read. This is a bit too pretentious for my taste but once you get past the Woe-is-the-Human-Race navel gazing McCarthy puts on a good show. He has a nice eye for occupationally specific nomenclatures and the lack of chapter headings push you on to read one more page past where you had planned to call it a night. This post apocalypse futuristic novel of Americans returning to Thomas Hobbes' dreaded state of nature was an Oprah Book Club selection although I can't imagine Oprah reading it and enjoying it other than her watching white Americans having turned cannibal on other whites.
The author's moralizing was quaint, and I love quaint. McCarthy's omniscient narrator revels in the slow disappearance of all vestiges of any religious framework leaving human consciousness as they struggle to live in a world where God doesn't exist and can't exist. McCarthy leaves the reader with a sense of hope that a new pantheism or at least an animism (Native American spirituality perhaps) will take hold in a more practical usefulness than prior organized religions had. As The Man and Boy pass each day with fewer and fewer words to communicate with, God has no way to be addressed except through rituals improvised on the spot without reference to how symbols work. Symbols are community based and transmitted actions which carry meaning beyond words over human generations. The world described in The Road is hopeless but the ending intends to frustrate that suffocating circumstance with a forming of a new community of youth and caring by a single family adding new members. McCarty's No Country For Old Men film adaptation was violent but well done. I have not yet read No Country for Old Men but I hope to now. The Road, as a novel, is also well done although it carries, not violence, but menace and release from societal morality to make its points of argument. The Man shields the boy and the reader from all that he experiences and suffers and in doing so The Man shields us as well. The readers form a close bond with The Man and Boy but the world they flee as fugitives we readers are already well acquainted with. Plato's Thrasymachus and Machiavelli's Cesar Borgia are always interesting characters defending the claims of the strong or mob leaders. It's an interesting thing to see a man and boy do what they can to avoid perishing from the natural elements as well as eluding humans who have given themselves over to satiating their basest needs. ( )

The movie was hard, but the book was harder. Being inside the head of The Boy and feeling his abiding fear was more than I could stand. If THe Man had been alone, I could have finished. ( )

Wow!!! ( )

I read this book a few months ago, but it has not yet got out of my mind. It is an unsettling book to say the least. Like all great literature, it is not an easy book to read, not because the writing is difficult (the writing is brilliant!) but because it plays all our emotional buttons. An environmental catastrophe on Earth and its aftermath becomes the foreground were a father's attempt to retain his own and his son's humanity weighs against the pure instinct of survival. This is not a book for the light of heart. But a book to ponder on what makes us all human, and what are the long-term consequences of our environmental choices today. Great, great book! ( )