King Arthur Movie Tristan

title: The Road

author: Cormac McCarthy

genre: fiction

published: 2006

pages: 287

first line: 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.

rated: 5 out of 5




The Road is a difficult book to review because I feel that my review won't do it justice. The writing is beautifully sad, dark and poetic.


McCarthy's style of writing is different than what i'm used to, and I really liked that. There's no chapter breaks and the book flows from beginning to end.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this.

The cold and 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.

The story starts off with an unamed man and his young son wandering along a bleak road. The world seems to have suffered an immense catastrophe, there is ash everywhere and the survivors have chronic coughs. Everything is burnt and fire seems to be what nearly brought the world to an end. The son was born soon after the apocalypse. This father and son are in constant danger, not only from the elements but from other survivors and wanderers who are also looking for food and shelter. There are few survivors and many are living in groups, hunting humans for food, which is just a horrible thought in itself, that at the near end of the world, such evil survives.



The story just seems to get from bad to worse as the father has flashbacks of his wife who committed suicide, leaving her husband and son alone. As the book goes on, you see how suicide is always on the back of the fathers mind. He even tells his son this is the only option they have if they are ever caught by the 'bad people' and he carries his gun with him at all times.



One part that had me in tears is when the young son catches a glimpse of another wandering little boy. In that instant, the father has to grab him and they are on the move again, but the son keeps crying about how they have to go back and get this little boy. He says he will share his food with him. The son cries and fixates on this other boy that he wants to help so much. Throughout the story you see how pure and good the son is, how much forgiveness and hope he has in his heart. The love and bond between this father and son is strong and the two survive off of that.






As I was reading The Road I found myself feeling for these characters, they need each other to survive emotionally. It's a sad book that stays with you long after you've finished reading. There's a scene where the son takes out his little toy to play with in the midst of all this darkness and despair, just the image of that was heart wrenching. The father and son go from being near death, to finding food and having hope, to being near death again. There's glimmers of hope here and there throughout the story. I did cry while reading it. The way the dad loves his son so much is really touching. At one point he gets up in the middle of the night and just starts sobbing, angry at the injustice of their situation.





I can see why this book has been called a modern classic. I recommend it, but also know that as beautifully written as it is, it's an emotional read that will grab you and not let you go, even when you are done reading.





Here's a few passages that stood out:

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddently exposed to the day.

He walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somehwere two hunted animals trembling like ground foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. On the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cannot give up. I won't let you.

No list of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.