The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Feb. 19th, 2009 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other.
Set after an unspecified catastrophe that’s caused the fiery destruction of many cities and plunged the world into a nuclear winter, McCarthy’s novel follows an unnamed man and his unnamed son who are making their way down south in the hope of finding people who haven’t succumbed to the cannibalism and depravity that’s overtaken the other survivors. This isn’t a book for people who like plot – it’s about the relationship between the man and his son, specifically the man’s attempts to shield the boy from the horrors around him, and the reaction of the two of them to what the world has become.
It’s a bleak read, the events are unrelenting and dialogue is sparse and often repetitive. I found the first 30 pages difficult to get into, particularly because McCarthy removes apostrophes from words like “dont” but keeps apostrophes for words like “I’d”. If the intention is to show the breakdown of societal rules or the man’s difficulty in remembering how things used to be, then I’d have liked it to be consistently applied so I got more of a context. The failure to do so was distracting and irritating.
I’d have liked to know what it was that caused the road to be buried in ash and set the cities on fire but the man’s memory of seeing flashes in the sky is ambiguous (could be a nuclear attack, could be a meteor strike). However what happened is not the key thing for this novel, McCarthy is more interested in the breakdown of society and what mankind has become and his vision of cannibal tribes keeping slaves and attacking people for the meagre food supplies that are left is chilling and shocking, the more so for the sparse descriptions. Particularly effective is a scene set in the basement of a house, the true horror of which only becomes evident when you read it twice and realise what’s happened to a person on a bloodied mattress.
Biggest disappointment was the ending, which is the only time that McCarthy pulls his punches and although the ambiguity can be read in several ways, I felt he was pushing the reader in one direction. That said, his descriptions are evocative, the future shockingly plausible and it’s something that lingers in the mind long after you read it. I can see why this novel won the Pulitzer in 2007.
The Verdict:
It’s not a perfect book and it’s taken me a while to sort out my thoughts about it, however the fact that I still found myself thinking about it days after I’d put it on a bookshelf isn’t a common thing for me and the sparse but chilling descriptions stick in the brain. I’d have preferred a little consistency in the application of apostrophes and the ending didn’t quite work for me, but this is one award-winning book that made me understand why it was award-winning.
A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other.
Set after an unspecified catastrophe that’s caused the fiery destruction of many cities and plunged the world into a nuclear winter, McCarthy’s novel follows an unnamed man and his unnamed son who are making their way down south in the hope of finding people who haven’t succumbed to the cannibalism and depravity that’s overtaken the other survivors. This isn’t a book for people who like plot – it’s about the relationship between the man and his son, specifically the man’s attempts to shield the boy from the horrors around him, and the reaction of the two of them to what the world has become.
It’s a bleak read, the events are unrelenting and dialogue is sparse and often repetitive. I found the first 30 pages difficult to get into, particularly because McCarthy removes apostrophes from words like “dont” but keeps apostrophes for words like “I’d”. If the intention is to show the breakdown of societal rules or the man’s difficulty in remembering how things used to be, then I’d have liked it to be consistently applied so I got more of a context. The failure to do so was distracting and irritating.
I’d have liked to know what it was that caused the road to be buried in ash and set the cities on fire but the man’s memory of seeing flashes in the sky is ambiguous (could be a nuclear attack, could be a meteor strike). However what happened is not the key thing for this novel, McCarthy is more interested in the breakdown of society and what mankind has become and his vision of cannibal tribes keeping slaves and attacking people for the meagre food supplies that are left is chilling and shocking, the more so for the sparse descriptions. Particularly effective is a scene set in the basement of a house, the true horror of which only becomes evident when you read it twice and realise what’s happened to a person on a bloodied mattress.
Biggest disappointment was the ending, which is the only time that McCarthy pulls his punches and although the ambiguity can be read in several ways, I felt he was pushing the reader in one direction. That said, his descriptions are evocative, the future shockingly plausible and it’s something that lingers in the mind long after you read it. I can see why this novel won the Pulitzer in 2007.
The Verdict:
It’s not a perfect book and it’s taken me a while to sort out my thoughts about it, however the fact that I still found myself thinking about it days after I’d put it on a bookshelf isn’t a common thing for me and the sparse but chilling descriptions stick in the brain. I’d have preferred a little consistency in the application of apostrophes and the ending didn’t quite work for me, but this is one award-winning book that made me understand why it was award-winning.
