The Road--book review
THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy is an odd little post-apocalyptic father-and-son tale.
Spoiler alert!
Post-apocalyptic fiction has enjoyed a resurgence of late--THE HUNGER GAMES and BONES OF FAERIE being two recent YA examples--and so I thought I'd take McCarthy's novel out for a spin. I'm not usually a "literary" reader, and this book won the Pulitzer prize, so honestly it had one strike against it from the get-go. (Call me a reverse snob. It's okay.) It features oddly-worded prose (the father and son are "each the other's world entire," for example), no apostrophes, no quotation marks. Even without much in the way of description or setting--the reader surmises it's a post-nuclear-war world, but we don't know exactly where the characters live or what year. It really doesn't matter, because the entire book is nothing more than a survival journal of sorts. They scrounge for food and clothing and shelter. They contend with the constantly falling ash. They keep roaming because if one stays in one place one become vulnerable to traveling bands of cannibals. They are the "good guys" even though the dad does bad things in the name of saving his son. The son questions his father's moral authority. They survive until one of them doesn't. And then the remainder of the pair oh-so-conveniently meets up with a small group of "good guys" that doesn't eat people and he travels on. The end.
While I didn't see a real plot (this book was more about themes and character) the imagery was brutal at times, which I appreciated. If one is going to write a post-apocalyptic story, after all, one can't pull any punches, and McCarthy doesn't. One scene depicted an abandoned camping spot with a cooked infant on a spit; another detailed a basement filled with humans being kept for food; in another, the father taught his son how to commit suicide if he ever got caught by the "bad guys." In McCarthy's world a woman of child-bearing age is important--not as a means of continuing the species, but as a means of potentially feeding it.
THE ROAD is like dinner at an expensive restaurant. Sure, the food's good, but ultimately it's over-rated. The experience doesn't make up for the ordinary mashed potatoes.
Spoiler alert!
Post-apocalyptic fiction has enjoyed a resurgence of late--THE HUNGER GAMES and BONES OF FAERIE being two recent YA examples--and so I thought I'd take McCarthy's novel out for a spin. I'm not usually a "literary" reader, and this book won the Pulitzer prize, so honestly it had one strike against it from the get-go. (Call me a reverse snob. It's okay.) It features oddly-worded prose (the father and son are "each the other's world entire," for example), no apostrophes, no quotation marks. Even without much in the way of description or setting--the reader surmises it's a post-nuclear-war world, but we don't know exactly where the characters live or what year. It really doesn't matter, because the entire book is nothing more than a survival journal of sorts. They scrounge for food and clothing and shelter. They contend with the constantly falling ash. They keep roaming because if one stays in one place one become vulnerable to traveling bands of cannibals. They are the "good guys" even though the dad does bad things in the name of saving his son. The son questions his father's moral authority. They survive until one of them doesn't. And then the remainder of the pair oh-so-conveniently meets up with a small group of "good guys" that doesn't eat people and he travels on. The end.
While I didn't see a real plot (this book was more about themes and character) the imagery was brutal at times, which I appreciated. If one is going to write a post-apocalyptic story, after all, one can't pull any punches, and McCarthy doesn't. One scene depicted an abandoned camping spot with a cooked infant on a spit; another detailed a basement filled with humans being kept for food; in another, the father taught his son how to commit suicide if he ever got caught by the "bad guys." In McCarthy's world a woman of child-bearing age is important--not as a means of continuing the species, but as a means of potentially feeding it.
THE ROAD is like dinner at an expensive restaurant. Sure, the food's good, but ultimately it's over-rated. The experience doesn't make up for the ordinary mashed potatoes.