Swedegeek’s Blog

Review

Rating: 10

For the record, I read this book before Oprah announced it was to be part of her book club. I read it while on our Florida vacation.

At any rate, The Road by Cormac McCarthy was yet another book pushed upon me by my friend who admonished me to read Snow Crash. He was into McCarthy’s western novels, but I told him I couldn’t do a western. That left The Road.

The story is an extremely haunting tale of a post-apocalyptic world. A father and son are trying to travel south to avoid the impending winter. The landscape is covered in ash, animals are nowhere to be found. There are scattered groups of humans they run into a long way. Some try to hurt them, some are neutral. No one can help them. They travel under gray light from an invisible sun by day and must survive the darkest black of night.

I really enjoyed this book. Cormac McCarthy’s storytelling with little dialog reminds me of Hemingway, but I doubt it’s a tribute to him. Two people spending day after day trudging through a barren wasteland would indeed have little to discuss. He even minimizes the dialog more by eliminating quotes and even apostophes where they aren’t needed. That takes a little getting used to, but you eventually don’t even notice.

At the same time, there is much more than walking that goes on here. There are flashbacks that hint of what might have destroyed their world. Some disturbing scenes show just how bad things have become. However, there is also hope and determination in the story. Without either of those, why travel down The Road in a world that no longer exists?