The Road

I finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road over the weekend. It was a Christmas present I had just gotten around to reading. At 242 pages and with McCarthy's spare, minimalist approach to writing, The Road took me little more than a day to read.

The Road is so grim and desperate I don't know I could recommend it unless I knew you were already a McCarthy fan. The story takes place on an earth after some great nuclear holocaust, in a nuclear winter not too far into the future. All life save for a few wretched humans - most marauding cannibals - is extinguished. Ash fills the atmosphere blocking the sun and blows relentlessly throughout the landscape. Snow and rain fall much of the time.

We follow a man and his son - good guys they call themselves - as they travel a lonely road to the coast. The mother has already "checked out." They love each other and care for each other, scavenging for food, trying to stay warm. But in the desolate and hopeless world created by McCarthy, you have to wonder whether morality, compassion and caring have any meaning at all, whether love has become an anachronism. McCarthy does his best to convince us compassion has no meaning, love is an anachronism.

I like McCarthy and have read a couple of his other novels. But for me, though The Road makes its point successfully, it will be a while before I care to visit such a bleak, impossible world again.

McCarthy is an acquired taste. Your mileage may vary.
K-