The Road

I don’t normally write reviews, but this book is SO bad that I’m making an exception. Why would you even think to write a book like this! There’s no chapters, no names, no speech marks (in fact very little punctuation at all). There are countless made up words. All this and I’m only 60 pages in! I wanted to give it a chance due to all the five star reviews, but it’s just impossible to work out what the hell is going on, and I’m wasting my life trying to take it any further. I cannot understand how it has so many good reviews, I’m starting to think there’s something wrong with me!

The most boring and unnecessarily over written story i’ve ever read. I cant be bothered with over complicated writing nor do i want to resort to google or a thesaurus/dictionary every few pages.The story jumps around like a child’s book from one scene to the next literally in paragraphs. I had no connection to the two or any environmental imagery to feed my immagination, apart from two people in the woods/a road oh a cab no truck oh here’s the trolley....ahh so boring...just stopI’m about 50 pages in and i just cant be bothered reading anymore, what a waste of my time and effort.Plus the binding is shocking, most of the pages have fallen out in a brief spell of heat.Just watch the walking dead or something else, this is just so poorly written.

Cormac McCarthy’s bleak, heart-breaking post-apocalytic novel of the remaining few survivors, scrabbling towards the final, dying days of a wasted, destroyed planet, some time in the very near future would have been a sombre, regret filled read at any time.But in these days where the Presidential Office is filled by an erratic, self-obsessed and unreflective man, McCarthy’s book seems far less fictional than might be comfortable. Less allegorical and possibly more prophetic. I hope not.The ‘event’ some ten years ago in the past is never spelled out, but, there was a blinding flash, there were sonic reverberations, and people burned, disfigured. Some kind of nuclear winter appears to have occurred. Almost all living things have now ceased to be – vegetation, insects, birds, mammals, most humans.Pockets of survivors, feral, cannibalistic exist in the unnamed place, somewhere in America, where the novel takes place.The central characters are a man, and his child, a boy who is probably now 10 years old. His mother is no longer living, and why, will be revealed. The father looks back to a time before the event, before his son was born, before the world was catapulted into these dark days.His son is his reason for living, he has been charged, he charges himself, to take care of his boy. Some years after the cataclysm, and all the available food sources (whatever there was, canned), in houses, in stores, across the world, have all been looted by whatever survivors there were. Most have long since, horribly, died, but those small bands who remain – are they people of decency and humanity, or are they those who now regard other humans merely as food, offering a few more weeks and months of survival for those who kill them?Bleak days, little hope. And yet, McCarthy offers us a strong love, some relic of who we might have been, when we seemed to ourselves to be evolution’s finest flower. There is the tenderness and dependence of father and son upon each other, as they walk a road ‘South’ in search of warmer weather Practical tasks occupy the pages. Scavenging odd discovered stores of tinned food, clothing, rags to bind round feet, wheeling all these worldly goods in abandoned supermarket trolleys. Balancing the need for fire and warmth with the possibly dangerous signals given out by smoke.The reader knows the father and his son are ailing, infections taking hold, breathing laboured. The outcome is bleak, cannot be good, for either. Nonetheless, there is also something about the child. He has a kind of holy innocence about him. He might be a kind of naïve fool – or the repository of human wisdom, not intellectually, but in goodness, in kindness, in tenderness and that so sullied thing ‘humanity’ Time and time again he rather sets a moral compass for the father to orientate towardsThere are many, sometimes subliminal nods to religious imagery, and I thought this a kind of journey through an anti-Garden Of Eden, where nothing grows, but the child might be – possibly a new kind of ‘Adam’.“It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away of every side. It’s snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom”McCarthy does the reader the great service of keeping a kind of ambivalence going in the story. We know how the story must end, realistically, without appeal to any kind of magic, corn, or unsatisfying tied up wrap. But, isn’t life itself something evolving? There have been earlier cataclysms which destroyed life as it was known. Didn’t other forms arise? Might a conscious, a self-conscious species, be able, some of them, to choose to be some kind of bearers of light?I found the concepts, the far wider considerations McCarthy was presenting the reader, kept me engaged and absorbed, as did the practical details. Father and son, and particularly, that relationship between them, and the father’s memories of ‘before’ were all extremely powerful.And, often his writing is magnificent, carrying his weighty themes, particularly in his chilling descriptions of the new, harshly wasted world“The land was gullied and eroded and barren. The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes. Middens of anonymous trash. Farmhouses in the fields scoured of their paint and the clapboards spooned and sprung from the wallstuds. All of it shadownless and without feature. The road descended through a jungle of dead kudzu. A marsh where the dead reeds lay over the water. Beyond the edge of the fields the sullen haze hung over earth and sky alike”Despite these undoubted strengths I sometimes struggled with McCarthy’s writing. He has a tendency to a kind of portentous elevation, using archaic language – and then over-using it. As example, he carefully seems to want to avoid using the word ‘wash’ replacing it with ‘lave’ Using an unusual or poetic word like that, once or twice, helps the feeling of strangeness. But if every time something – hand, face, hair, knife is not washed, but is laved, it becomes grating and repetitive in a way the reader would not have noticed if the common word had been used over and again, for a common actionStill, a very powerful read indeed

"The Road" my Cormac McCarthy is a post-apocalyptic novel, relaying the relationship between father and son, as they traverse to "the south" in pursuit of the Holy Grail. Laden with ash, and "curtailed" by snowfall, collapsing trees and "blanked out" billboards of a former meritocratic nation-state, the novel brings forth a spiritual and transcended notion of the father and son's reality. They find themselves in the land of the "godless", a world destroyed by mankind's pursuit of a materialistic destiny. Indeed, "The Road"'s dystopic visuals, providing a panoramic vision of the world will move the read. It is a must read, and although being the first McCarthy book that I have read (as part of the A-Level), I will have lasting memories of it.The film by John Hillcoat provides the "ashen land" of the book's religious, post-apocalyptic landscape with visuals congruous to the novel. Read the book, and watch the film. Enjoy.

I was unsure whether I would enjoy this novel but decided to go ahead anyway. Tremendous stripped back descriptive style, at odds with the wordy need to give unwelcome context that seems endemic to many American writers.Even though I sympathised with 'The Man' and engaged with what he must be agonising over every moment, it is certainly 'the boy' that is the barometer for mood, level of hope and the continuance of human spirit as humanity moves forward in the unwritten future after the book finishes.I wholeheartedly recommend this novel on many levels - engagement with character, fear of what may happen at any moment, evocation of hopelessness, simplicity of style.