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: Right on....!
Summary: 2 Stars
I am less enamoured with this book than the other reviewers. The post-apocalypse novel is a well-trodden path now and this one offered nothing that was new beyond the "right on" setting of a world (or was it just the US?) destroyed by global warming. The trouble is that McCarthy does not explore this catastrophe at all. His nightmare world could have been conjured by any one of a number of circumstances without changing the story one iota. There is little plot and too much is derivative of the likes of John Wyndham and John Steinbeck. To me this was an ordinary novel made "great" in the eyes of many by its topical theme. If a novel is to make the world sit up and think about global warming, I feel it will have to be better than this one. If you are buying it for its insights I think you will be disappointed.Book Review: Hope Road.
Summary: 5 Stars
As I sit here slack-jawed after finishing `The Road' in two readings, I am in awe of Cormac McCarthy and his ability to capture the human spirit in a way no other author can. 'The Road' is at once terrifying, haunting and sad, and no book has made me think more about our future on this planet than `The Road'. This book is a marvel, and everyone should read it. I believe it will become a classic in line with 'The Grapes of Wrath', and winning the Pulitzer Prize is the least of its accomplishments.
As the book begins, you are immediately confronted with the terror of an apocalypse having occurred. You feel saddened and sickened by what misery may befall us. McCarthy's representation of the setting is so vivid that the images are burned into your brain right off the bat, and you feel you are trudging along with this man and his son, step-by-step, through the ashen and gray countryside, on your way to who knows where. There are very few characters, and none of the characters have a name. I have never read a book wherein the very names of the characters are withheld, yet you have such a visceral knowledge of each one. I had tears in my eyes by page eleven, in part I'm sure, to Cormac McCarthy's amazing ability to give characters such depth and shape in so few words. The narrative is interesting in that the punctuation is informal, and there are no chapters. I believe the book would not have worked as well if it had been broken up into chapters. The situation of the characters was continual- there were relatively few interruptions- it was one long moving trek, day after day, sometimes one day blurring into the next, and, without wanting the book to end, you want their journey to end, because you feel so tired for them.
Throughout this journey, the man and his son are met with reviling, repugnant and absolutely terrifying situations that make you question humanity; however, you soon remember that the characters are already in life after an apocalypse, and there is no such thing as humanity anymore. Amazingly, through all this, Cormac McCarthy is able to imbue the book (and the characters) with a modicum of hope. In this defeating situation, hope is the only thing that keeps the man and the boy going. You wonder how a person would be able to have hope in circumstances so dire, but then you realize that hope is something quite unique to human beings. As we have seen in real life, our will to survive and hope for a future is what continues our species; and even with the catastrophic senselessness, sadness, and despair that permeates the story of `The Road', in the end, HOPE is the one thing that redeems it.
Book Review: Oprah Makes a Good Choice
Summary: 4 Stars
The first 150+ pages of THE ROAD are mesmerizing, as McCarthy follows a father and his son through a dangerous ash-covered world, where life, but for a few humans, has been annihilated. For me, this portion of TR reads like a great road novel--episodic but fully involving--as the father and son scavenge for food, avoid murderers and cannibals, and find ways to survive.
Then, McCarthy starts to give the father and son moments of small yet profound triumph. Instead of just avoiding death, they temporarily find food and shelter. They survive illness. They reach the ocean. For the reader, these should have been great moments, with the characters finding what McCarthy calls mini paradises or sustaining each other and their reasons for living. But no, these triumphs feel like interruptions in a story of gritty survival. That's when you realize that the unrelenting focus of this book--survival--has flattened the characters and produced grim two-dimensional stick figures. This is a shortcoming in otherwise terrific work.
TR, by the way, seems to turn BLOOD MERIDIAN, a genuine masterpiece by McCarthy, inside out. In TR, the style is spare. In BM, the style is lush and complex. In TR, characters confront and seek escape from a raw and dangerous world. In BM, characters join a mad and vicious enterprise. In TR, a father recognizes the evil of the world and tries to limit its effects. In BM, a father figure sanctions and enables evil. Finally, in BM, there is a dominant philosophical position--basically, that inherent to men is a capacity for immense evil--that is strengthened by the novel's amazing ending. But in TR, the ending seems perfunctory and dissipates the grim statement of the book. Maybe things aren't so bad, McCarthy seems to say.
Since I mentioned arbitrary endings, here is my own, which shows what the great McCarthy can accomplish with a spare style.
"He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."
Book Review: Needs tinkering but still roadworthy
Summary: 4 Stars
Two or three pages in, I nearly gave up on this book. I'm glad I didn't. I nearly gave up because of the eccentric prose. I thought: Oh no, not another "Shipping News". I mean it's very clipped, often staccato, and regularly doesn't obey conventions like punctuation and grammar. The lack of commas particularly makes many sentences difficult to understand (they exist for a very good reason) and also the pronoun "he" is bandied about too often without its being clear exactly to whom this refers. Lack of question marks, too, and misssed capitalisations of proper nouns like English and Spanish. I was constantly re-reading sentences. The repetition (at least three times) of the misplaced apostrophe in "two day's [sic] time" also jarred. But I suppose McCarthy was making a point with this: at the end of the world what do petty rules matter? Only trouble is the reader lives in a very real pre-apocalyptic world and is likely to find the writing style irritating after a while. Also there were many, many (presumably) Americanisms that totally bamboozled my OED. Canebrake? Salitter? Masonjar? Etc. And because of his economical sentence structure it's even sometimes difficult to use the context to guess at what they are. Two or three times whole paragraphs were indecipherable to me. I can only assume they were dreams or daydreams.
If you can see past this, you'll enjoy the book. I think its charm lies in its simplicity. Just two nomadic characters with a shopping trolley in a volcanic landscape. Speaking of which, is it literally volcanic? Was this the infamous Yellowstone volcanic eruption that featured in a recent "what if?" documentary? I think this setting is easy to conjure up in the mind's eye. But I think the relationship between the father and son is less successful. It is too optimistic in its love-conquers-all message. I mean, after five days without food in a freezing landscape and neither is even bad-tempered? There's no bickering. Castaways go crazy sooner and eat their children! These two are saints! Or they would be if there was a pope to recognise them as such. Since their father-son relationship is the whole point of this book, this is quite a major flaw. Another disappointment for me was the seemingly random and inconsequential few weeks of their lives during which this book is set. Civilisation has long since crumbled. The catastrophe occurred (we learn from a very few flashbacks) many years ago. So how have they survived thus far? I think that far from a depth of vision McCarthy chickened out a little of telling the real story here, which is not what happens when law and order has long since ceased and we are reduced to hunter-gatherers once more, but the process by which it occurred. In that sense it's not ambitious enough for me.
But I don't want to get too negative. I enjoyed this book immensely. It's always sad, sometimes scary and even raises a few smiles. It's a good addition to the end-of-the-world genre.
Book Review: Splendid
Summary: 5 Stars
In terms of its seeming simplicity, from other novels he has written. Dark, terrifying and powerful, this is one of the finest American novels in years. Its structure and muscular prose are so stark and well-crafted, this story picks you up, shakes you and won't let go even after you've read the final page. Also, if you missed Tino Georgiou's masterful novel--The Fates, go and read it. It is the first novel of the century that could rightly be called a masterpiece.