The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Book)

Genre: Post apocalyptic father and son fiction

304 pages

About $10

--9/10--

The Road is a little like a new pair of shoes. They look nice, and when you try them on at the store they seem great. Once you put them on at home though you're confronted with a few blisters and your feet get sore the first day. However, walk around in them for a couple of hours and you're rewarded with a great shoe wearing experience.

The Road is a tough book to get into. It starts out confusingly and with some very heavy speculation about the nature of things. That and the fact that the characters don't have names and there is some unusual punctuation, or lack of it, makes the book all too easy to put down. I know, I stopped reading it twice. Thus is the beauty of The Road though. It is a book where the writing style very much matches the setting, something that is not necessarily hard to do, but something that is often very challenging to do effectively.

The plot moves slowly most of the time, with bone jarring juts of intensity sprinkled throughout. The story moves so slowly that the reader is often lulled and McCarthy seems to slap you in the face saying "pay attention you dolt, stuff IS going to happen." While the book doesn't actually slap you, the narrative does an excellent job of drawing the reader in. Once you get going it is hard to put the road down, and the compassion it elicits for the characters, as well as humanity itself, makes it a must read book.

The story follows the man and the boy as they journey down the eastern coast of the United States hoping to reach what they hope will be a sunny and warm Florida. They have only a shopping cart full of things and very little chance of finding much else except death and starvation. One of the interesting things about McCarthy's novel is that it doesn't have a true antagonist, unless you consider life to be the bad guy. The pair is looking only safety and happiness, and no matter how hard they try they cannot seem to find it. The book is sad but it doesn't force you to like it, there aren't any cute moments or tear jerking breakups. To call the story bleak is an understatement, but it goes a long way towards making one appreciate things just a little bit more.