The Road | A Fantastic Read

The Road | Children into darkness

The Road

	The Road Knopf, 2007 average customer review:based on 1491 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy?s masterpiece.

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 Road is 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.

From the Hardcover edition.

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A Fantastic Read

I'm always skeptical of you-won't-be-able-to-put-it-down recommendations, but in this case it held true. I read the book in a weekend and was enthralled the entire way. McCarthy creates a narrative tension that's hard to break away from. The second part of the recommendation was, "Read it before the movie comes out." So I'll second that -- you've got until late November to get through this one.

Children into darkness

(SPOILER WARNING!) As a father of a boy some years younger than the boy portrayed in the book I can't help feeling that the book touched an inner blind spot of myself. A father stands beside birth and doesn't possess the immediate emotional connection that mothers do as a source of comfort and shelter. This is painfully vivid in The Road where the father comforts throught words and principles rather than emotions. Shelter is built through realism rather than embrace: knowing the hard facts will keep danger away. His most emotional expressions typically surface when the boy sleeps. At the end of the book the boy has to face the "future" alone and the father dies probably in terror of his failure. Can a father ever truly know how to touch his child? A mother IS but a father REPRESENTS. The questions posed within the pages of The Road will take a long time to sink in and even longer to answer. I do know that I will look at my boy with different eyes from now on.

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