The Road (Oprah's Book Club) by Cormac McCarthy Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: The Gnostic Prophet's Fable of Apocalypse
Summary: 4 Stars
Cormac McCarthy has had a surge of creative productivity recently, with an unprecedented volume of manuscripts coming to print. This release is another assault on new territories, being McCarthy's first and possibly only foray into sci-fi. His ouevre to date has been fed by a diligent scholarship, anchoring his imagination in some historic milieu (most notably, Blood Meridian, drawing heavily on Samuel Chamberlain's accounts of the Indian conquests). The Road, however, is the first novel McCarthy has set in a time not yet come. His capacity to re-invent his terms of reference and offer us something refreshingly different, albeit always with that unmistakeable signature of gothic poesy, is a hallmark of his prodigious talent.
A linear, episodic novel, this book charts the road-trip of a nameless father and son as they journey through blasted wastes of ash and fire, heading coastward in search of warmer climes, the sun blotted out by clouds of post-apocalyptic smog. It is an utterly haunting memoir of a desolate, ruined world traversed by a father and his young son, the latter stiff with fear. Roaming cannibalistic hordes threaten their safe passage, and mysterious mendicants, vagabonds and chain-gangs constantly menace the delicate safety that the father seeks to circle round his son. Amidst this Mad Max of horror, moments of painful tenderness punctuate the destruction. The testimony of love that survives the scorched absolution of our planet is the novel's redeeming grace. It may be that all of McCarthy's writing has been narrowing in on this place. As a grand-master of American death literature growing old, the presence of oblivion and nothingness has been expanding in the textual and imaginative fields of his prose (his last novel, another breakthrough as McCarthy turned his hand to hard-boiled crime thriller - with lashings of secret allusion and literary resonance for the astute - was itself textually patterned with intimations of nothingness, successfully lending a terrifying undercurrent to the surface thriller). It is wrought in McCarthy's trademark language, albeit leaner and more pared than the gothic baroque of Suttree or Blood Meridan, and has luminous spots of beauty located amidst the ash and decay. It will thrill hardcore McCarthy supporters. Occasionally let down by moments of cloying rheum and lapses of saccharine schmalz, however, as the universal father expresses his love for his heir, these are merely local blemishes that fail to mar an epic fable. McCarthy is the finest living American writer, and he cements his status with this latest offering.
Book Review: The Road
Summary: 5 Stars
Cormac McCarthy's latest book `The Road' is quite possibly the best thing you will read all year.
Stripped of some of the author's usual dense, impenetrable prose the story of a father and son's journey through a horrifically bleak post-apocalyptic landscape is at once McCarthy's most accessible work and his most affecting.
As ever McCarthy never shies away from portraying humanity's propensity for plumbing ever greater depths of depravity. Indeed with the all trappings of society long past, this evil is unbound upon a ruined and desolate country. The journey of the father and son against this relentless backdrop is one of holding true to an innate sense of goodness, against enormous odds. It is a story about the cost of overcoming, the great price this road exacts and the desperate struggle to hold onto hope and light when all about is fallen.
I read it straight through in two feverish days and would recommend you to do the same. It is hard to imagine a more perfectly crafted thing.
www.horselatitudes.co.uk
Book Review: "Are We Still The Good Guys?"
Summary: 5 Stars
'Concurrent with keeping his son alive is the more metaphysical challenge of sustaining his son's innate goodness while forcing him to witness the corruption of all moral behavior. "Are we still the good guys?" the boy asks in moments of confusion and shock. His father insists they are. "This is what good guys do," he tells him. "They keep trying. They don't give up." Why, then, his son asks, won't he help the stragglers they run across instead of running from them or shooting at them? "We should go to him, Papa. We could get him and take him with us. . . . I'd give that little boy half of my food." How to explain the necessity of abandoning others to certain death (or worse, in one particularly terrifying scene) while maintaining that they're "the good guys," the ones "carrying the fire"? Washington Post
Cormack Mccarthy has given us a glimpse of a world none of us want to see or visit, but we are there. It is desolate, singulatory, stark, bleak; all of these words and more are needed to describe a world after a nuclear explosion. We are left to imagine the events, the place, and the time. All we have are these two souls, dad and son, no names. They are moving from one place to another to get to the coast, why, we do not know, are left to wonder. Along the way Mccarthy describes the world we never want to see. Smoldering even after a few years, everything black and stripped of any semblance. Not many people, and those they meet, they are afraid of. Looters, and murderers and eaters of flesh. These two souls, father and son, the two evidences that love can keep you going, can keep you on the right path, and can keep you "One of the good guys". There is not much to keep you going safe. Death, no food, no shelter, no clothing, harsh and cold environment, only your wits, and then it is hard to keep them together. A harsh and cold path and if it is what we have to face, Cormac Mccarthy has given us the most beautiful prose and surreal writing.
This is a book to be read by everyone. This is a book to be remembered, to be revered and to be kept in the recesses of our brains, to come out only when necessary. This book begs to be discussed. So many nuances, so many allegories, and no many scenes that is reminiscent but new.
"He knew only that the child was his warrant," it says of the father and his mission. "He said: if he is not the word of God never spoke." The love of a father and his son, the greatest love of all.
Highly, highly recommended. prisrob 10-14-06
Book Review: Blood Meridian in a starker landscape
Summary: 5 Stars
The book arrived this morning from Amazon. I could'nt put it down and walked the dark ashenroad with father and son all day.
Buy this book and be moved by McCarthy at his best.
Book Review: The Road works!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Great book. Cormac Mccarthy has a wonderful knack for writing easy to read, yet dark and compelling fiction. Set in the Mad Max 2 style post apolcalyptic near future, this is a hugely enjoyable horror thriller, even if it is a little flawed (but so are most horrors technically). Borrrowing from many other ideas, not least of all that low budget flick 28 Days Later of which it shares a number of ideas (all good mind). If you like your horrors, gruesome, dark and not loaded with unneccesary overblown attention to detail then The Road is near perfect. This is probably Mccarthy's best novel along with Blood Meridian and The Crossing. I know you're not supposed to judge a book by it's cover, but the cover of The Road is, well, just plain dark, so judge away. I actually enjoyed this so much I'm tempted to read it again within a week. That's the highest praise I can give.