Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – A Review

I’ve been getting my read on, and the latest I read is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s been sitting on my shelf to read for quite some time now, and I’m glad I finally got to reading it. So here’s what I thought.

The setting of the book is one of the most gripping elements of the story. It’s set in some post apocalyptic country, likely the USA, several years after some cataclysmic event destroyed nearly all natural life. As a consumer of much post apocalyptic literature, particularly of the zombie variety, this setting is a refreshing wind through the genre. Rather than concentrating on how people learn to survive once their TVs don’t work, it goes all the way to the end, where people have been scavenging the earth for years and there is little left. Every jar of food counts, every trickle of water counts. And it is unknown whether there are survivors in other parts of the world. The feeling one gets while reading it is of pure isolation.

The two protagonists, a nameless man and his boy, carry an admixture of hope that the road they follow will bring them to warmer climates, and despair that they will not find food. True to McCarthy’s usual writing, they venture forward unyieldingly, but intelligently. They must evade cannibals, people who might steal their food, the man rightly sees every possible person as a threat to their well being. As such, it is a lonely world without friends or companionship beyond the father-son bond.

This is all set in the bare minimum of prose. At once it is both eloquent and minimalist. It conveys the bond between the man and his son with stark brutality. Few words are exchanged, and they are always related to survival. And the violence of the prose in describing the setting is beautiful. One does not have awe inspiring landscapes, instead everything is dull grey and dead. A lesser writer would have embellished the landscape, trying to create beauty where there was none. Instead, the minimalism of the prose reminds us of the brutality and simplicity of the world that mankind now inhabits, one of death and despair.

Having been a fan of post apocalyptic literature for some time now, I found The Road not only refreshing but beautiful. It is a new take on the old genre, and for having done that, McCarthy shows himself to be a writer that can work outside the confines of a genre. And true to his emphasis on violence, there are some grizzly scenes of human brutality. It’s not a holiday book that one reads for fun, most of McCarthy’s work is not typically “fun” literature, but it does offer a glimmer of hope in the barren wastelands of his creation. I’d give it an A+. I’m unsure of whether I’m going to be ready to read it again any time soon, but it is worth every word the first time around. Read it when you’re in a melancholic mood or in the mood for a good book, the book offers just enough hope that it is both realistic and stays true to its original bleakness.