Here's my fawning review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Despite this book being fawned over by Oprah Winfrey and her book club, I must say this is one of the most entertaining reads I've had in a while.
It's horrific.
It's hungry.
It's human.
It's also on Amazon
.
The story is set in an unknown time of an unexplained post-apocalyptic event. A great fire has scorched the earth along the road on which a tired father and his son travel seeking warmer climes.
Forget the story for a moment and read the writing, it is pure literary porn. This line is from the first page of The Road and just by itself it conjures up a bleakness that no winter frost could ever predict:
Note the glaucoma line should probably have a comma. Cormac McCarthy only uses full stops, question marks and the odd apostrophe for punctuation. He's a real Charles Dickens. This lacking only serves to highlight the bareness of the travellers' path.
At its heart, The Road is a story of an endearingly protective father who guards his son's life with his own. This is not Finding Nemo but is a broken road through hell where the sharks are men who think nothing of eating human flesh, in fact in McCarthy's world these men harvest the arms and legs of their captives, while the captives are still alive.
It is literally day-to-day living.
What gets you, if you let it, is that the apocalypse is not the point. The apocalypse is the setting, the ash, the dim light, the background hum of dread. The point is the father trying to keep one small clean thing alive in his boy, a moral ember that McCarthy names without softening it, carrying the fire. It is not bravery as a pose. It is decency as a daily chore, performed while starving, freezing, and terrified.
The plot keeps testing that ember. The revolver with its limited bullets turns mercy into arithmetic. The road offers brief miracles, a hidden cache, a meal, a bunker, then steals the feeling away again. The house that seems safe proves the opposite. The basement scene is the one that makes you put the book down, not because it is shocking in a cheap way, but because it feels like a system, like a new economy built from the worst parts of human need.
The savage enough but this book didn't win the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007 for nothing (The Color Purple or To Kill A Mocking Bird are past winners) .
It would not be wrong to imagine that this is what's left of the earth after the monsters found in The Book of Revelations have passed through.
Frankly, after reading this novel Jesus would have wept more than the time Judas betrayed him.
Not that Jesus could read English, mind you.
Unsurprisingly The Road was being made into a film by John Hill Coat and starred Viggo Mortenson and Charlize Theron (as the mother in quite depressing flashbacks - contrast with Imperator Furiosa as a feminist icon).
When I was 13 I read Z for Zacharia, a children's book about a young female teenager trapped in a valley safe from a nuclear wasteland but who was being tormented by Mr Loomis.
That story has always remained in my memory with its near rape and always pending doom - The Road replaces that for me and I doubt I'll be able to eat meat from a spit roast in a while.
Buy The Road from Amazon
now. Don't watch the movie instead. Read the book! Then the film!
It's horrific.
It's hungry.
It's human.
It's also on Amazon
.The story is set in an unknown time of an unexplained post-apocalyptic event. A great fire has scorched the earth along the road on which a tired father and his son travel seeking warmer climes.
Forget the story for a moment and read the writing, it is pure literary porn. This line is from the first page of The Road and just by itself it conjures up a bleakness that no winter frost could ever predict:
"Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world"
This sentence just sets the tone of the novel perfectly.Note the glaucoma line should probably have a comma. Cormac McCarthy only uses full stops, question marks and the odd apostrophe for punctuation. He's a real Charles Dickens. This lacking only serves to highlight the bareness of the travellers' path.
At its heart, The Road is a story of an endearingly protective father who guards his son's life with his own. This is not Finding Nemo but is a broken road through hell where the sharks are men who think nothing of eating human flesh, in fact in McCarthy's world these men harvest the arms and legs of their captives, while the captives are still alive.
It is literally day-to-day living.
What gets you, if you let it, is that the apocalypse is not the point. The apocalypse is the setting, the ash, the dim light, the background hum of dread. The point is the father trying to keep one small clean thing alive in his boy, a moral ember that McCarthy names without softening it, carrying the fire. It is not bravery as a pose. It is decency as a daily chore, performed while starving, freezing, and terrified.
The plot keeps testing that ember. The revolver with its limited bullets turns mercy into arithmetic. The road offers brief miracles, a hidden cache, a meal, a bunker, then steals the feeling away again. The house that seems safe proves the opposite. The basement scene is the one that makes you put the book down, not because it is shocking in a cheap way, but because it feels like a system, like a new economy built from the worst parts of human need.
The savage enough but this book didn't win the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007 for nothing (The Color Purple or To Kill A Mocking Bird are past winners) .
It would not be wrong to imagine that this is what's left of the earth after the monsters found in The Book of Revelations have passed through.
Frankly, after reading this novel Jesus would have wept more than the time Judas betrayed him.
Not that Jesus could read English, mind you.
Unsurprisingly The Road was being made into a film by John Hill Coat and starred Viggo Mortenson and Charlize Theron (as the mother in quite depressing flashbacks - contrast with Imperator Furiosa as a feminist icon).
When I was 13 I read Z for Zacharia, a children's book about a young female teenager trapped in a valley safe from a nuclear wasteland but who was being tormented by Mr Loomis.
That story has always remained in my memory with its near rape and always pending doom - The Road replaces that for me and I doubt I'll be able to eat meat from a spit roast in a while.
Buy The Road from Amazon
now. Don't watch the movie instead. Read the book! Then the film!
