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: Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a truly beautiful novel.
The scenario in which McCarthy places his characters - a post apocalyptic wasteland - seems so hackneyed that nothing of value could be wrung from it, but McCarthy's sparse elegance and unrelenting cinematic vision draws nourishment from this dead metaphor just as his main subject, an unnamed man (in this regard, as in many, McCarthy invokes his "Western" roots) draws nourishment from handfuls of dead chaff scratched from the floor of a barn.
McCarthy's writing is really exquisite: it these post-ironic times it is almost a guilty indulgence (and is that ever ironic, given the content!) to be treated to such master craftsmanship in the construction of simple, stark sentences. The imagery is consistently arresting, whether it be of wallpapered mansion walls bloated and buckled with years of seepage, the heavy sea heaving and lagging, like some ashen, gunked-up pit of slag, or of an emaciated person likened to a human skull inhabited by an animal. (I'm trying my best to paraphrase, but alas I'm no Cormac McCarthy)
I found poems repeatedly came to mind: not just Eliot's The Wasteland, but Shelley's Ozymandias, in the shape of the buckled mansions, abandoned cities and wrecked, over-blown road, and Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in the visualisation of an environment so unrelentingly wet, yet utterly devoid of any life. There is no hint of even a new shoot of vegetation - let alone a life force like drinkable water: for all the rain and snow, the ash contamination means the couple are continually on the point of dying from thirst.
A few commentators have remarked on the "saccharine" ending, but I found no such thing: As a father, I found the father's dilemma as the book concludes was almost too unbearable to read, and the irony of the child's eventual resolution only accentuated the book's grim process.
Beautiful, haunting, and lyrical.
Olly Buxton
Book Review: A harrowing tale of a father and a son
Summary: 5 Stars
The author tells the story of an unnamed country completely destroyed by fire and abandoned by its people in which two nameless characters, a boy and his father, undertake a long and painful journey to the southern parts of that country where they hope to find a milder climate. Their only possessions are their clothes, a cart and a pistol to defend themselves against all manners of bandits who stalk the roads. They survive on scarce canned food which they manage to find in long abandoned houses and their constant fight against the excruciating cold is a daily battle for survival. At times their progress along the road seems pointless because there appears to be no hope anywhere. People are hostile and aggressive and the boy and the father owe their survival largely to their love for each other in the face of complete devastation and desolation.
A poignant novel, gripping to the very last word, in which we see mankind at its worst and at its best.
Book Review: Nobel Prize quality writing
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel is a stunning piece of work. The quality of the writing is magnificent, up there with the very best modern American authors such as Updike. McCarthy has the knack of instilling a foreboding sense of fear and of unease in this book; although there's nothing particularly gruesome or violent about it, per se, I was filled with dread as I addictively turned the pages. Some of his sentences are pure poetry, others merely genius. This is his first I've read since All The Pretty Horses (a novel I loved when I read it some years ago) but I'll work my way through the others now. Read it now - but not before you go to bed, as I did, otherwise you're in for some dark dreams.Book Review: A bleak, desolate but inspiring read
Summary: 4 Stars
The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Two travellers, a man and his young son -- both unnamed -- follow the road south in search of a warmer climate.
Their journey is a treacherous one. They trudge through snow, pushing a shopping cart loaded with their worldly goods, and are constantly on the look out for the predatory "bad guys" out to steal their belongings. They have a gun for protection, but the bullets have long run out.
In this rather chilly, desolate and oppressive landscape, the man and his son devote most of their time to walking and looking for food. They spend their evenings huddled under a plastic tarp, frightened that the cold will kill them.
This extraordinary, wholly believable tale is part horror, part fantasy. While nothing much seems to happen, the reader is compelled to keep turning the pages if only to find out whether the man and son will ever reach their destination.
The fear resonates off the page, but so, too, does humanity. This seems ironic given the inhumane conditions in which the characters find themselves. But it is small acts of kindness by the son, who is too young to have his compassion knocked out of him, that makes the story especially moving without being sentimental.
This lack of sentimentality is aided by prose -- and dialogue -- that is crisp, clear and almost as anorexic as the characters it portrays. The maxim make every word count is very much apparent here.
Despite the bleak and sometimes disturbing nature of The Road, the reader reaches the final page torn between an overwhelming sense of sadness and a realisation that life means nothing without love.
Book Review: A Thousand Shades of Grey
Summary: 5 Stars
If you like your fiction to have an equitable balance of light and shade, peopled by a galaxy of interesting characters and interspersed with humour and social interaction, then The Road is certainly not for you. However, to cast this book aside would be to miss one of the most extraordinary feats of imaginative world painting in modern literature. McCarthy's subject is as bleak as it is possible to imagine: a post apocalyptic planet Earth in perpetual nuclear winter where the landscape is dead or dying covered in a ubiquitous black ash slowly choking and silencing every living thing. It is a world without sun, animals, and plants where a few humans scavenge to survive abandoning all compassion and morality to do so. Amidst this nightmare a father and his son are found trekking across the wasteland of the United States heading for the coast hoping to find something in a world where hope has ceased to exist. It is their story which holds our attention: amidst the endless desolation and as they battle to survive, McCarthy explores the doubts, suspicions, loyalties and trade offs which typify any filial bond with enormous sensitivity and perception. Yet this pair must face questions unlikely to have been faced by many in any era: what is the point of life when the world as we know it is just a disappearing memory in the mind of a father whose son knows only a world of emptiness? Why try to survive when there is no chance of life being sustained over the long term? Ultimately they find purpose in their own inter-dependence wherein they learn to find all meaning and incentive. This subject is not a new one of course, but what makes The Road so compelling is the author's ability to create this grey, desolate world with such sustained authority and conviction: never once does the curtain of illusion fall, not for a second is the spell broken: we walk the endless highways of nothingness, we ponder where the next can of food might be found, we share the fear that round the next corner might be a marauding armed gang ready to kill for a bottle of water. Beginning from a canvas painted with almost photographic realism, the writer affords his subject an almost allegorical form in order to ponder the philosophical issues raised by the annihilation of the earth and the consideration of what it means to live without expectation of a future. Written in shorn down, skeletal prose with not a single redundant phrase, McCarthy has created an unforgettable and profoundly moving meditation on what it is to be human in a world almost beyond the comprehension of mankind. A stunning achievement.