NATIONAL BESTSELLERPULITZER PRIZE WINNER National Book Critics Circle Award FinalistA New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the YearThe Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington PostThe searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac … Post
The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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I read The Road years ago and loved it. Haunting and deeply disturbing.
If you haven’t read it and you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, give it a try.
It’s been a while since I actually sat down and read this book. I did so the first (and last) time for a University class, and I wasn’t too disappointed, but it didn’t do much in way of impressing me either.
The novel is an early 2000s imagining of what the end of the world would look like, if the end of the world were full of soot, darkness, and cannibals. The entire narrative shifts around a father and son who, with a shopping trolley full of supplies, are trying to make it to the sea; they seem to be under the impression that getting to the sea would solve all their problems. Or at least, keep them safe.
The father and son serve as an exploration of the relationship and love between family members in times of crisis. Father will do anything to keep his son safe and as innocent as possible; son will do whatever his father asks, because he knows it’s for the best. Through their journey across what used to be America to get to the coast, they find themselves encountering death, relics of a time long gone (such as Coca Cola), death, a human race who has succumbed to the purest sense of ‘survival of the fittest’, and more death.
What I found particularly interesting about the novel isn’t the plot itself, but rather what seems to have happened before the plot. The apocalypse that has hit the world seems to be one caused by humanity’s selfishness, a selfishness that has destroyed the environment and created the desolate wasteland they inhabit now. The entire world is sooty and dark, due to either some for of chemical warfare, or humanity damaging the environment beyond repair. What’s especially interesting about the apocalypse is that it seems to have been around for a much longer time than we initially think. The son was born during the apocalypse, presumably at a time when it hadn’t escalated to the state it reached during the plot. His mother abandoned the the family when he was just a baby, presumably committing suicide because the thought of living in a world so dark and grim drove her mad. The boy has never heard of Coca Cola, despite being no older than years old, and his father talks about the stuff as if it were gold. But it all leads to one simple conclusion: this is something that has been happening for years, possible decades, and what we’re seeing now is the culmination of everything that happened into one, very desolate landscape.
Ultimately, this book served as a very crystal clear reminder of the road we could possibly be heading down. Speculative fiction is a very powerful tool – from Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to Orwell’s 1984, we’ve seen authors’ ways of imagining our future, and how bad it could possibly get. But every speculative future in fiction comes from a place that we all know we could actually get to some day. There is some truth in the speculation; otherwise, authors wouldn’t be warning us about it like this.
Final rating: 3/5. I think the fact I had to read it for a class put a bit of a damper on me, but it’s still pretty good, if only for the message it gives.
Tough book to read. I ended up reading only 10 pages at a time. Hard to read and hard to put down. If you have read anything by this author, you will understand.
It was an amazingly good book, just tough to imagine living in this world.
Over the course of a long and distinguished career, Cormac McCarthy’s work has established him among the elite in American literature. Tracing Western themes in past and contemporary milieus, he has created his own mythology of tough American figures etching their rugged and oftentimes brutally violent presence along the borderland region of the Southwest. In perhaps his most personally revealing novel, The Road takes a grave look at the future. The novel may be a divergence from the settings of McCarthy’s previous body of work, but his prose ascends to a profoundly new level of artistry as he charts the travails of an unnamed father and his son through a post-apocalyptic world of burned-out cities and ash-covered landscapes. This is a story of unimaginable devastation, but it is also a tale of remarkable survival and ultimately an unforgettable portrait of love between father and son. The tragedy that has befallen the world in The Road forces the father and son to encounter great suffering, yet McCarthy’s imagery and descriptions, though terrifying in their vision, contain a beauty that is heartbreaking and unbearable. It’s as though his language proclaims the stubbornness of life against the void capable within the hands of human destructiveness. Here is one example: “By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.” In this world of death and demise, seemingly without hope, McCarthy asserts a precaution of future nuclear holocaust. In doing so, he points out a biblical-like truth about the Earth: “The frailty of everything revealed at last.” This is a disturbing book, but the love generated between the father and his son places goodness against the disaster the world has become. The poetic beauty McCarthy finds in the madness will grip readers and not let them turn away, no matter how horrifying.
The darkness can make it hard to see that this book’s true center is a father’s love for his son. This is a frightening novel but it can also be devastatingly beautiful if you allow your eyes to adjust.
The Road is another novel I would never have purchased on my own. I don’t enjoy postapocalyptic novels (and not just because I can’t spell or pronounce a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-t-i-c.) But once I got into the story, I couldn’t put the book down. I was filled with questions: What happened to the world? Who are those roving gangs? Is the boy really his son? What happened to his wife? I kept flipping through pages faster and faster, hoping to find the answers.
If you’re looking for a book that wraps everything up in a neat little bow at the end, this is not the book for you. This is a book, which forces you to think. I finished this book on a flight from Dallas to New York two weeks ago, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Unfortunately, these are not happy thoughts – not surprising considering the novel is postapocalyptic.
McCarthy’s style of writing takes some time to get used to. His lack of punctuation – according to McCarthy, semicolons and quotation marks are mere little marks that blot the page – was confusing as all get out. The internal editor in me was going out of her mind while I read this novel. Luckily, at some point she had a complete hissy fight and shut up.
In addition to learning that award-winning authors can write their own grammar rules, I discovered – to my utter surprise – that I would not survive a postapocalyptic world. McCarthy describes in detail how the protagonist finds and prepares ‘food’. Food is in question marks as I’m not sure I could stomach – literally – the things the protagonist ate. If the food choice didn’t do me in, the work involved in finding food, using makeshift tools, and finding fuel would have finished me off. That’s before taking the weather, roving gangs, and all that walking into consideration.
I would have never thought a novel singularly focused on a man and his son walking a road would pull me in. (I assumed I was going to have to force myself to read this novel.) It’s a testament to the talent of McCarthy that I was utterly and completely captivated by The Road. This is a must read and in the running for best novels I’ve read in 2018.
More religious tones than I expected, but very well written
Beautiful tone and epic amounts of suspense make this one of my favorite dystopian novels.