The Road (Oprah’s Book Club) by Cormac McCarthy (EPUB)

Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son’s fight to survive, this “tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy’s stature as a living master. It’s gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful” (San Francisco Chronicle).A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.The Roadis the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Amazon.com Review Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as “an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century,” Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we’ve read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. –Daphne DurhamGuest Reviewer: Dennis LehaneDennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play). Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it’s not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that’s the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy’s previous work. McCarthy’s Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out–the entire world is, quite literally, dying–so the final affirmation of hope in the novel’s closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father’s (and McCarthy’s) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. –Dennis Lehane Review A New York Times Notable Book • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post”His tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy’s stature as a living master. It’s gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful. It might very well be the best book of the year, period.” —San Francisco Chronicle”Vivid, eloquent . . . The Road is the most readable of [McCarthy’s] works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization.” —The New York Times Book Review”One of McCarthy’s best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review”Illuminated by extraordinary tenderness. . . . Simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear. The Road offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be.” —The New York Times”No American writer since Faulkner has wandered so willingly into the swamp waters of deviltry and redemption. . . . [McCarthy] has written this last waltz with enough elegant reserve to capture what matters most.” —The Boston Globe”We find this violent, grotesque world rendered in gorgeous, melancholic, even biblical cadences. . . . Few books can do more; few have done better. Read this book.” —Rocky Mountain News”A dark book that glows with the intensity of [McCarthy’s] huge gift for language. . . . Why read this? . . . Because in its lapidary transcription of the deepest despair short of total annihilation we may ever know, this book announces the triumph of language over nothingness.” —Chicago Tribune”The love between the father and the son is one of the most profound relationships McCarthy has ever written.”—The Christian Science Monitor”The Road is a wildly powerful and disturbing book that exposes whatever black bedrock lies beneath grief and horror. Disaster has never felt more physically and spiritually real.” —Time”The Road is the logical culmination of everything [McCarthy]’s written.” —Newsweek”There is an urgency to each page, and a raw emotional pull . . . making [The Road] easily one of the most harrowing books you’ll ever encounter. . . . Once opened, [it is] nearly impossible to put down; it is as if you must keep reading in order for the characters to stay alive. . . . The Road is a deeply imagined work and harrowing no matter what your politics.” —Bookforum About the Author Born in Rhode Island in 1933 but raised and educated in Tennesee, Cormac McCarthy is the author of a dozen previous novels and the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here.When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke. When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep. He’d pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets. He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.I’m right here.I know.An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to abandon the cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon a roadside gas station. They stood in the road and studied it. I think we should check it out, the man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about them. They crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps. The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The pumps standing with their hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact. The door to the service bay was open and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one wall. He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use. Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy stood in the door. A metal desk, a cashregister. Some old automotive manuals, swollen and sodden. The linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof. He crossed to the desk and stood there. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father’s house in that long ago. The boy watched him. What are you doing? he said.A quarter mile down the road he stopped and looked back. We’re not thinking, he said. We have to go back. He pushed the cart off the road and tilted it over where it could not be seen and they left their packs and went back to the station. In the service bay he dragged out the steel trashdrum and tipped it over and pawed out all the quart plastic oilbottles. Then they sat in the floor decanting them of their dregs one by one, leaving the bottles to stand upside down draining into a pan until at the end they had almost a half quart of motor oil. He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns. You can read me a story, the boy said. Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I can.. . .On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadowlands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned. Farther along were billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered. At the top of the hill they stood in the cold and the wind, getting their breath. He looked at the boy. I’m all right, the boy said. The man put his hand on his shoulder and nodded toward the open country below them. He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste. Nothing to see. No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes. Of course you can. The boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you see? the man said. Nothing. He lowered the glasses. It’s raining. Yes, the man said. I know.They left the cart in a gully covered with the tarp and made their way up the slope through the dark poles of the standing trees to where he’d seen a running ledge of rock and they sat under the rock overhang and watched the gray sheets of rain blow across the valley. It was very cold. They sat huddled together wrapped each in a blanket over their coats and after a while the rain stopped and there was just the dripping in the woods.When it had cleared they went down to the cart and pulled away the tarp and got their blankets and the things they would need for the night. They went back up the hill and made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him. Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless dark come to enshroud them. The gray shape of the city vanished in the night’s onset like an apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back out of the wind. Then they walked out to the road and he took the boy’s hand and they went to the top of the hill where the road crested and where they could see out over the darkening country to the south, standing there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets, watching for any sign of a fire or a lamp. There was nothing. The lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more than a mote of light and after a while they walked back. Everything too wet to make a fire. They ate their poor meal cold and lay down in their bedding with the lamp between them. He’d brought the boy’s book but the boy was too tired for reading. Can we leave the lamp on till I’m asleep? he said. Yes. Of course we can.He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian. Can I ask you something? he said.Yes. Of course.Are we going to die?Sometime. Not now.And we’re still going south.Yes.So we’ll be warm.Yes.Okay.Okay what?Nothing. Just okay.Go to sleep.Okay.I’m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?Yes. That’s okay.And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?Yes. Of course you can.What would you do if I died?If you died I would want to die too.So you could be with me?Yes. So I could be with you.Okay.He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through the trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.They passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.You forget some things, dont you?Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.There was a lake a mile from his uncle’s farm where he and his uncle used to go in the fall for firewood. He sat in the back of the rowboat trailing his hand in the cold wake while his uncle bent to the oars. The old man’s feet in their black kid shoes braced against the uprights. His straw hat. His cob pipe in his teeth and a thin drool swinging from the pipebowl. He turned to take a sight on the far shore, cradling the oarhandles, taking the pipe from his mouth to wipe his chin with the back of his hand. The shore was lined with birchtrees that stood bone pale against the dark of the evergreens beyond. The edge of the lake a riprap of twisted stumps, gray and weathered, the windfall trees of a hurricane years past. The trees themselves had long been sawed for firewood and carried away. His uncle turned the boat and shipped the oars and they drifted over the sandy shallows until the transom grated in the sand. A dead perch lolling belly up in the clear water. Yellow leaves. They left their shoes on the warm painted boards and dragged the boat up onto the beach and set out the anchor at the end of its rope. A lardcan poured with concrete with an eyebolt in the center. They walked along the shore while his uncle studied the treestumps, puffing at his pipe, a manila rope coiled over his shoulder. He picked one out and they turned it over, using the roots for leverage, until they got it half floating in the water. Trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet. They tied the rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake, jerking the stump slowly behind them. By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack and shuffle of the oarlocks. The lake dark glass and windowlights coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I’m not sure why this is an award winning novel. There was love in a dark world, but the story was the same dreary day over and over, hoping to get to a part of the book where things improve. There was a glimpse and then it was gone. Dad and boy struggle to survive. Dad dies a slow death. Kid goes on with other people . There I just saved you a lot of time.

⭐A Dad and his kid aimlessly ramble through a burnt post-apocalyptic world for 287 pages. Little dialogue, no adventure, no nothing. A pointless read and a waste of my time. Whoever nominated this for ANY award should never be listened to again.

⭐To say that The Road is a rather dark book would be quite the understatement….As far as dystopian literature goes, this is quite a step.The story of a father and his son, walking to the sea through a ravaged, cold and grey world, hoping to somehow, find a better place, doesn’t leave much space for a happy ending. Bleak is truly bleak here, not a lot of silver linings!And yet…and yet, this is a beautiful book.The writing is fantastic, for starter. The style, with short and descriptive sentences, carries the story to perfection. It also has a poetic quality that softens what is said/described and gives it another dimension.The real beauty of the novel isn’t on the outside though, but resides inside, in the incredible bond uniting father and son, a love so deep and unconditional that it seems to erase age gap and life experience, to only focus on their desire to care for each other. This love and concomitant sense of humanity stripped to its essence, manage to give sense and meaning to their otherwise hopeless journey.On a deeper level, it also seems to invite us to reflect on what makes a life meaningful: beyond a primal survival instinct, what makes life worth living even when there is no hope in sight? The Road’s answer is that, ultimately, what matters isn’t “what” makes your life, but “how” you choose to live that “what”…

⭐I hate to give this book five stars.I’m a father. I read The Road years ago when my son was nine. I honestly had no idea at the time that I was picking up a book about a father and his roughly nine year old son. That’s not a spoiler, you find that out on the first page.Look, Cormac McCarthy writes so well I actually come back to his books on my shelves and open them up randomly, just to read a page and soothe my brain. But he digs the knife in so deep. I’ve actually hesitated to review his books before because there is so much beauty in the writing I just don’t have the first ability to get a sense of it across.More than that. I actually resented him after finishing this book. I wanted to shake his hand and punch him in the face. Maybe that’s why I waited so long to finally admit this book deserves any accolade I could give it.I finished The Road while sitting on a plane in Hong Kong, waiting to take off in the rain. I was a grown man, struggling so hard not to sob out loud that I started to choke. You might want to try “All the Pretty Horses” first, or even “No Country for Old Men,” but those will grip you, too. I’ve never seen the man pull a punch. I think it also might depend where you are in your life. Just take my advice, if you’re a father and you have a young boy, hold off on this, or at least read it when no one is around.

⭐The Road bumped to the top of my TBR stack after the huricane struck our island. I thought there’d be no better time to identify with this book…oh how wrong I was. For a while me and my family felt the desperation and need for survival in our island but Cormac once again paints a world like no other.This is my third McCarthy read and it is definitely my favorite. The love of a mother nurtures the heart and the leadership the father shapes the character. The man (nameless father in the story) does everything to keep his son alive in this post apocalyptic world filled with danger and malice. This is a beautiful and admirable depiction of a father’s devotion to his son. My favorite line(s) in this book are morbid and conflicting with my afromention protection but there was a moment where this instruction was the lesser of two fates:”If they find you you are going to have to do it. Do you understand? Shh. No crying. Do you hear me? You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point it up. Do it quick and hard.”This book kept me humble and sane after living through a catastrophic hurricane and the havoc it wreaked on our way of life.Five stars Cormac has produced a masterpiece with The Road. I could not stop reading it.

⭐The Road is in my humble opinion, a literary masterpiece. That being said it is as dark and forbidding as anything I have ever read.If you have ever read a news article about an child who died with malicious neglect from their parents, malnourished and abused and it made you cry, that is what you will feel while reading this book. As a father it made me contemplate what lengths I would go to, what unspeakable things I would go to protect my children and by the end I sat sobbing.I would strongly recommend only reading this if you are in a good place in your life and you have capacity mentally and emotionally to endure this dark glimpse into what a world would look like at the end of society as we know it. The only reprieve is that the book is such a quick read.

⭐I knew very little about Cormac Mcarthy prior to reading this book. I’m going through a phase of consuming post apocalyptic stories and after much deliberation I thought I’d give it try. I’m so glad I wasn’t put off by some of the negative reviews. The Road is beautiful, thought provoking, compelling and life affirming. I hesitate to say it was a pleasure to read given the tone and subject matter but I recommend this book to anyone who is prepared to engage their brain and open their heart.McCarthy’s writing emotionally tied me to the characters without the usual writing conventions I’d expect, life doesn’t necessarily provide us with nice neat answers or resolutions to things especially in this case where nothing is normal and will never be so again. Why worry about fripperies when all human life has been cleaved down to the barest essentials, the novel’s style and prose reflects that in many ways. I was fully immersed in the story from the start, it’s not a long book, it was easy to follow the various exchanges and the story flowed beautifully. But be warned it’s emotionally draining and very bleak, it hurt my heart to read some of the passages, this truly frightening world McCarthy brought forth will live me for a long time.Forget the whys and wherefores of how the earth reached this hellish state, that’s honestly not important. The Road is basically a love story between a man and his son, McCarthy dedicates this book to his own little boy at the start and it’s abidingly clear that the primary focus for the reader should be on this relationship and its development, it positively burns through the pages. Man and boy are nameless (as are most of the characters we meet) but it didn’t lessen the power of his writing to convey the incredible depth of their love and reliance on each other.What we do learn is that there was an apocalyptic event around the time of the boy’s birth, its clear the effects were utterly devastating, life appears to have been extinguished save for a few pitiless souls left to walk the barren ash choked wasteland killing, stealing and scavenging for what’s left of any canned/preserved food or worse resorting to cannibalism. They trudge day after day through a world that appears stripped of life, of colour and a future for humankind. The boy knows nothing of the time before the tragedy, living in constant fear, cold and hunger for him is normality for the father it’s much worse, a desperate sadness at what has been lost that he is loathe to articulate, he remembers his old life in dreams and brief recollections and it’s from these that we get further insights into the past with his wife and family.The man is getting sicker by the day as they travel through the seemingly eternal grey, bleak, inhospitable, cold wasteland along a road. There is no sun, they are fighting constant starvation, the days are growing darker and colder as if heralding a nuclear style winter. They are moving south towards the coast as the father knows they can’t survive another winter where they’ve been living. It’s better for the father to have some goal to reach in order to hold on to his sanity and hope for the future and his son’s well being so they keep on the move. Hope, humanity, goodness and faith are key here it’s about “keeping the fire” as the father calls it, they are “the good guys” and his son demands reassurance of this fact at various stages and this sustains both of them despite the apparent desperateness of their situation.The father is deeply mistrusting of anyone they meet with his fearsome desire to protect his child who he looks up to almost as a vessel of goodness in this hellish world. When certain incidents happen the boy gets very upset and begins to fear they are no longer the good guys, this schism reflects more on the general fear of any parent desperately wanting to equip their child with the tools for survival and independence but fighting the need to control and fiercely protect. To compound the issue, the father realises he’s running out of time but equally the son carries the burden of knowing that soon he will be left alone to fend for himself, this forms an unbearable emotional strain between them.The tenderness the father expresses towards his son was deeply moving, despite the sparseness of the dialogue between them, the father is only still alive because of his son who is equally dependent on him. His fear and anguish over the boy at key moments almost had me in tears, the future is left opaque and undecided, it may be hopeless it may not, the reader is left to surmise for themselves many things and that’s how it should be. McCarthy’s gift in his writing is to keenly show in a very painful and raw way how loving someone can be and that the strength found in that is sometimes enough to carrying on.The rather stark, simple exchanges between father and son I found curiously moving and heartfelt and there are many touching little moments described. Also, the father is constantly tormented wondering if the time comes could he kill his child to spare him almost certain defilement. I can only imagine how much this story would resonate and especially if you’re a parent. “You have my whole heart”, the father says at one point, such simple honest beauty in that line!The Road shows us the strength of love and how in our darkest moments it can bind and hold people together against extreme circumstances that should crush the human spirit. Yet some if us choose to go on even if in the end the universe makes our existence appear almost meaningless. I can see why this book won acclaim.

⭐I don’t normally write reviews, but this book is SO bad that I’m making an exception. Why would you even think to write a book like this! There’s no chapters, no names, no speech marks (in fact very little punctuation at all). There are countless made up words. All this and I’m only 60 pages in! I wanted to give it a chance due to all the five star reviews, but it’s just impossible to work out what the hell is going on, and I’m wasting my life trying to take it any further. I cannot understand how it has so many good reviews, I’m starting to think there’s something wrong with me!

⭐I really cannot understand how this book seems to get so many good reviews. In my mind, there is absolutely nothing to commend it. There is minmal plot and characterisation. But, worse than that, the structure and grammar are awful. I am assuming that the reason for a high proportion of “sentences” are not sentences at all, having no verb, was stylistic. The minmalist bleakness is probably meant to highlight the content. But, it just doesn’t work. Everything is very disjointed. I am used to reading “difficult” novels but this was barely readable and too pretentious for its own good. The only prize it should have won was the Turner Prize – for rubbish posing as art.

⭐Depression Trigger warning:This is my first Cormac McCarthy novel and in all honesty it’ll probably be my last. At present I have no desire or intention of ever reading McCarthy’s work again. This isn’t a reflection of the quality of his writing, which is in fact, wonderfully creative. Staggeringly so.McCarthy employs a very simple, but wholly immersive narrative style in this book. His characters are nameless. Cormac gives them a gender and a rough age, but that’s about it. His sentence structure is stripped down to the bare bones, in that he discards conventional use of punctuation and grammar, in favour of a flowing, short structure, cut with the occasional longer, more poetic monologue from the narrator’s point of view.This approach is hugely effective. The short, sparse structure reflects and amplifies the bleakness of the world he has placed his poor characters into. The longer monologues are beautiful, insightful and heart-breaking at times; these moments shine a bright light onto the broken structure between, making the shadows they cast and struggles described in them all the more dark…. inescapable.Aside from the skill in the rudimentary narrative and prose, Cormac employs some of the most immersive, descriptive settings and conveyance of the complexities of emotions his characters suffer through I’ve ever experienced.This book is so wonderfully written, it is simply beautiful, the use of language to convey such hardship, such stark, stripped back humanity and beauty, but by God, it is bleak, and the most emotionally-draining piece of literature I’ve encountered.The world of The Road is so very bleak, so lacking in joy or comfort or hope. Reading this book was a trial for me, I didn’t want to continue, but its beauty and humanity and raw splendour dragged me along despite myself.If you are in any way prone to depression or periods of low mods, I would recommend avoiding this book, at least until happier times. It is a marvel, it is simply one of the most staggeringly gorgeous and horrifically desperate pieces of fiction I’ve read. I’ll never read this book again, but the gap it let in me will remain forever.

⭐There are lots of great reviews here giving you an idea of the content of The Road. I wanted to say something about literary forebearers. Not necessarily about books that McCarthy drew on (although maybe he did) but works that regardless remind me of The Road and which can make The Road even richer. Definitely there are spoilers.First, the extremes of deprivation and suffering remind me of Arthur Gordon Pym. It would involve too many spoilers to say precisely in what way, but I imagine a PhD could be written comparing the two works. Pym was a major influence on Moby Dick, one of McCarthy’s favourite books. And, indeed, Moby DIck and Pym are based on real events that very possibly had a direct effect on The Road.Second, the relationship between the boy and the father, left alone in this desolate setting, remind me of Waiting for Godot. The mostly two person dialogue, in a sparsely populated wasteland, destroyed by something unspecified, is very Beckettian. The relationship is different, of course, and the absurdity of Godot is not here.Third — and is it possible that McCarthy is sometimes thinking of Beckett — of Molloy, especially the second half which concerns a father and son wondering alone in a pretty forbidding world and suffering considerable deprivation. In fact, I thought of Molloy almost from the outset.Of course, Robinson Crusoe is important, especially in the discovery of the boat. But this is no Robinsonade. I really enjoyed, however, the detailed account of the actions the man takes. McCarthy has an extremely practical bent in all his novels. He loves how things are made and their materials, and always he appears to know what he is talking about. Remember the detailed descriptions of firearms and the night sky in Blood Meridian? This focus on the concrete world is very rare, and perhaps not as common as it should be even in literary fiction.I also think there is a bit of I am Legend here. Of course so many modern zombie movies follow from Matheson’s book, and the scavenging for resources from a ravaged world is not unique to Matheson’s book, but the ending of the two books are quite similar. There is also an echo of A Canticle for Leibowitz. The Road is a very powerful book. Its the McCarthy book likely to appeal to the widest audience (perhaps excepting No Country For Old Men), but it is not a pop bestseller. It is a significant piece of literature well worth rereading.

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