I want to preface this review with the point that I am not at all recommending this book for anyone to read. It is extremely dark, brutal, and depressing - which is exactly what I liked about it. If you’re into that kind of stuff, this one’s for you.
The Road was written by Cormac McCarthy, and it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished fiction. McCarthy has also written All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, both of which have been turned into movies, with No Country winning the Oscar for Best Picture last year. The Road will be making it’s cinematic debut late this year.
McCarthy has quickly become one of my favorite authors. He possesses a truly unique writing style with an unsurpassed narrative ability. Interestingly, he is a stark critic of punctuation. He uses very few commas, no semi-colons, very few colons, and no quotation marks. While this could be confusing, it works perfectly for McCarthy. He’s such a good author he doesn't need to tell you that someone’s speaking. In addition, his characters are so fleshed out that a reference to who is talking is unnecessary. This makes reading his books almost like watching a movie, which is probably why adaptations of his works have been so successful.
The Road takes place after some unknown apocalyptic disaster has hit the world. All governments are completely gone, the land and sky is covered in ash, and America is an anarchy full of roving gangs, bands of cannibals, and lone travelers. To put it quite simply, the earth is a dangerous place. The story centers around a man and his son, neither of which is ever named. They’re referred to simply as “the man” and “the boy.” They are traveling along the forgotten highways to the South, particularly the ocean, where they believe it will be warmer. Along the way, they face all of those gruesome things mentioned above. They see the ultimate decadence of man and his true nature. Despite all of this, they hold onto the belief that something still separates the “good guys” from the “bad guys.” Over the course of their journey, they rely completely on each other for their continued existence: “each the other’s world entire.”
The man is obviously suffering from cancer, since every morning and night he coughs up blood. He constantly deliberates with himself over whether, when the time comes, he will be able to use the only bullet in their only revolver to kill his son, in order to save him being killed and eaten by the cannibals: “Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.” This is not a simple moral decision, which is why I admire the book so much. It presents much larger ethical dilemmas than the average novel.
Cormac McCarthy is a staunch opponent of the ideas of providence or purpose. He believes that random chance governs everything. This worldview is clearly evident in his books, particularly his unbelief in God. A quote from The Road reads, “there is no God and we are his prophets.” However, with a set-up like he gave this book, he could have turned it into a complete assault on the existence of the divine. For whatever reason, he chose not to do this. It is simply a character study, about finding hope in a world where no real cause for hope exists. In addition, it is, in my mind, one of the best (if not the best) examples in literature of the ideal father-son relationship.
Some of his statements in the novel come off as almost Biblical, like this one: “People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.” His books are ripe with such statements, where one must pause and ponder the meaning behind it. One of my favorite quotes from the book is the following one, which occupied my mind for a fairly long span of time - “Query: How does the never to be differ from the never was?”
As Christians, we know that even in such a dark, imposing landscape, God still exists. In the book, we meet one family towards the end which still believes this. They hold onto the idea that there is purpose to what we do.
I’ll leave you with the final quote from the book:
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patters that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
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