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: McCarthy at his very best
Summary: 5 Stars
An extraordinary, compelling and frightening novel examining the relationship between a father and son wandering a post-apocalyptic world in search of sanctuary. It's stark and bleak, even by McCarthy standards, and yet is probably the most emotionally raw of all his novels.McCarthy fans will once again be left in awe of America's greatest living writer...and the novel provides a perfect starting point for readers new to his work.
Don't read The Road too late at night...it has some genuinely terrifying passages, particularly if you are a parent...
Book Review: The Road Less Travelled
Summary: 5 Stars
Cormac McCarthy has spent a career writing darkly poetic literary fiction, principally revisionist westerns. He has resisted the temptation to make his novels more mainstream, for which I admire him greatly.
The Road is an outstanding novel. It is haunting, disturbing and deceptively moving. In tone and plot it most closely resembles his greatest previous work, Blood Meridian. Very few novelists achieve a great book; now McCarthy has two.
Book Review: This is a superb book
Summary: 5 Stars
I picked this up after reading a glowing review in the press. I'm completely new to Cormac McCarthy having never read any of his other works. I have to say this is a superb book.
The book is set in a post-apocalyptic future. Though it's never stated what exactly happened, the subtext suggests a nuclear winter following a war. The earth is burnt, all vegetation is dead and it rains and snows ash. The plot follows the journey of a man and his son towards the south in order to find somewhere they can do more than just survive. But as all food has now been plundered - this being several years since the disaster - they are always on the edge of starvation. They must travel without being seen, as most of humanity that is left has long since resorted to cannibalism to survive.
What this is really about though is the extraordinary relationship between man and boy. The lengths that the man will go to protect his son and see him through the other end. It is a novel that for all its darkness is full of love. And wow is this dark. Many authors have written about the end of the world/survival but I don't think I've read anything quite this bleak. The scenery is utterly symapathetic to the couple's plight. It is filled with an overpowering poignancy for things lost - birds, cows, blue seas.
This is a very sad but at the same time uplifting book. The language used is simple and the conversational parts between man and boy are deliberately kept short. A wonderful book that I couldn't put down until I'd finished.
Book Review: Rare depth
Summary: 5 Stars
The road is the story of a father and son travelling through a post nuclear holocaust landscape. They are heading for a coast they envision as holding the answer to the nightmare they have to live through each day on the road.
The road is far removed from the sort of books that hit the shelves these days, you never learn the fathers name and conversation is not written as quote. The relationship between father and son is so intense that it lights up the awful surroundings and events that befall them. The fathers determination to protect his child is unequivocal and ruthless. The story though is not soft and there are scenes that send shivers racing down the spine.
Though short this book is immensely powerful and moving, written almost like poetry, McCarthy paints a detailed and passionate account of love, devotion, horror and death that stays long in the memory and touches the reader deeply.
This is some of the finest writing I have come across for some time and I recommend 'The Road' without hesitation.
Book Review: Be prepared to re-write your top 10 book list
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the pleasing anomalies of McCarthy's fiction is that he is able to paint immensely vivid pictures with the sparsest of prose. In "The Road" he does so with such devastating effectiveness that the reader bears the full force of the author's post-apocalyptic vision. And, as the action is happening on one of the roughest roads ever traversed in literary fiction, that means getting uncomfortably close to every aspect of his characters' unbearable ordeal and horrific progress, which is a much more engaging and rewarding process than that sounds.
Despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that this novel is truly bleak and desolate (whilst his earlier novels just felt that way from time to time) it is strange to describe the overwhelming feeling of optimism it communicates, and the appreciation it begets for the mad mix of noise, colour and commotion which surrounds us, taken for granted.
"The Road" is a genuinely stunning novel.