The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
by Cormac McCarthy
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.94 You Save: $9.06 (60%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: Brilliant, memorable and very creepy
Summary: 5 Stars
Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic tale is a road worth taking
Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" is a bleak, depressing and occasionally horrifying novel. Against all odds, however, it ends up being an inspirational story about the love shared between a father and son. The two make their way across a cold, and ashen post-apocalyptic landscape, pushing a shopping cart filled with their belongings. The destination is unimportant. What matters is that they love each other and still haven't given up, even as the former civilization around them clearly has. As the father of a young son, I felt a strong connection to this father as he tried to protect his son from a cruel and dangerous world.
McCarthy never directly reveals it but it seems clear that it was nuclear war that ruined the world. "The Road" surprised me by bringing back childhood memories of reading descriptions of nuclear winter. Scientists such as Carl Sagan warned that, as bad as nuclear war would be, the aftermath could be even worse. Nuclear winter might choke the planet's atmosphere with dust and debris, blocking out much of the sun. Most plant and animal life we depend on for food would be doomed as well. A large-scale nuclear war, say between the US and Russia or the US and China, probably would kill at least two billion people, some immediately from the blasts and fires and the rest within days due to radiation poisoning. The survivors would be left to face a cold, contaminated and dark world. Most likely they would be condemned to slow death by starvation, disease and anarchy. With nowhere to run to, the human species would be driven to the brink of extinction. Considering our intelligence, resilience and diversity, some pockets of people might survive. But it would be close.
McCarthy did his homework because "The Road" rings true. It never exceeds the realistic vision a shattered world. Perhaps most disturbing of all are the gangs of cannibals who roam the barren countryside in "The Road". Some of them even keep people like livestock for future meals. But don't worry, McCarthy's book never stoops to the level of cheap gore celebration.
The boy's mother was unable to accept the new world and killed herself so the tired father and his young son are left to go it alone. The father is as determined to keep his son hopeful as he is to keep him alive. This is where "The Road" becomes something more than just another scary story. It becomes the touching and inspirational tale of love between a parent and child. They fuel one another with a reciprocal love that is unlikely given the circumstances, yet necessary given the circumstances. They provide each other with hope when everything around them appears hopeless. As I read this book, I wondered if I would be a good enough father to maintain hope for my son's sake even if everything around me seemed utterly pointless.
McCarthy's novel is a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Perhaps "The Road" will do more than merely entertain all those readers. Hopefully it might lead people to think about how easily our real world can become that ravaged landscape described in "The Road". Those who where born after the end of the Cold War may not be aware of the risk that nuclear weapons pose for all the world's people, even those living in small and peaceful societies such as the Cayman Islands. There is very little talk or concern anymore about the massive nuclear arsenals that some countries still maintain. The United States and Russia, for example, have more than 28,000 nuclear warheads between them. They keep thousands of these monstrous weapons on a hair trigger and ready to fly. Whether people are aware of it or not, these missiles and bombs remain one of the greatest threats to global civilization. The Cold War may be over but its greatest danger remains. Unfortunately, all one hears from politicians and the news media these days are concerns about a handful of religious terrorists who on their best day might be able to obtain and detonate a few very small nuclear bombs. Yes, such an event would be terrible and many people would die but it would be nothing compared to even a small, limited nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, for example.
One of the reasons "The Road" is such an appealing novel is that McCarthy never goes overboard with words. Just like the landscape, his pages are cold and barren. The tone it sets is perfect; too many words would ruin it. It's not difficult to turn a vision of nuclear war's aftermath into cartoonish nonsense--as Hollywood does so often. McCarthy wisely chose to hint and suggest, rather than drown readers in gory and depressing detail. It works.
"The Road" is a memorable story, one that will touch most readers. Yes, it's shocking and scary. Most importantly, however, it honors the love between a father and son. It reminds us that a parent's love for a child is strong enough to standup to just about anything, even the end of the world.
--Guy P. Harrison, author of
Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know About Our Biological Diversity
and
50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God
-
Book Review: McCarthy For Dummies
Summary: 5 Stars
I should have titled this review "Oprah's Practical Joke" because it HAS to be -- how could she recommend a brilliant work of literary fiction to 23 million viewers (and that's just the weekly count in the United States alone). I am delighted she did, and I think better of her for it, and that is not to say that I dislike any of her earlier choices -- I think she has good taste. (Disclaimer: I think that most of her audience does not, along with the most of ANY audience that totals in the millions).
I don't know why I look at one star reviews to brilliant works of fiction. They remind me of the time was driving over 13 hours in a non-stop car trip, and, to avoid sleep, I forced myself to listen to
Bill O'Reilly to stay awake. The other element of these negative reviews that called to mind O'Reilly was the bitter, divisive nature of the language that I found in the majority of them. One of the better
negative reviewers wrote, "Perhaps I'm not smart enough, or artsy enough," etc. I guess a few reviewers that fall into the negative column felt an urge to go the extra mile to justify their dislike for
this book.
It's okay to dislike this book, and it's okay to dislike Cormac McCarthy. But many of the negative reviews lead me to believe that, although the reviewers were turned off by Cormac McCarthy or this book, they suspected that there might be something that they are missing out on.
I think the problem some of these people might have with this author is that he expects a great deal from his readers. He delights in dead words, and his lexicon is superior to most people who read his fiction, myself included. He doesn't like punctuation.
If this bothers you, it is okay not to like him. I'm not writing this to convert anyone.
If you ARE turned off by McCarthy but suspect there might be something you are missing out on, I offer the following advice based on being an English major, which required me to read dozens of books I could not connect with, but had to in order to succeed in classes and speak
intelligently in class. Often times, I found myself genuinely liking a book that I, like many of the negative reviewers, wrote off as unworthy of my time.
5 TIPS TO FOR READING CORMAC MCCARTHY TO THOSE THAT DISLIKE HIM, YET THINK THAT THEY MIGHT BE MISSING OUT ON SOMETHING THE REST OF US ARE
ENJOYING:
1) Many of his characters have no names. "The man" and "the boy" are not unique to this book, it's kind of what he does. When he writes about "the man," think of a famous actor you know. When he writes about "the boy," form an image, even if something the author reveals later, such as the boy having blonde hair, contradicts your earlier imagining of the character. Keep your image. (I pictured the two as African-American).
2) You don't have to understand every sentence. If you are fond of looking up words in the dictionary, especially words to describe geological features of landscapes, medical procedures,
or the ins and outs of weaponry, then you'll love this book, and many of his others, especially BLOOD MERIDIAN. If you're like me, you would be doing yourself a favor to remember junior high, and your English teacher's lesson about "context clues." As frustrating as his prose can
be, he is a "big picture" writer, and most of us are "big picture" readers. You don't have to get everything to "get it."
3) Ignore the snobs that worship at this guy's altar. Cormac McCarthy is kind of like a really cool underground band that scored a hit song (All the Pretty Horses) long after they built a hardcore following. They resent the mainstream attention now attracts. I hate those people.
4) Know what you're getting yourself into. If you read professional or amateur reviews of his books, or, more practically, summaries of his novels, you'll know that the last sentence will never be, "and they all lived happily ever after." I can describe most of the critical moments of his books in one word: muddy.
5) Look for themes. For most people, this is not pleasure reading. Odds are, you will find yourself hurled into a paradoxical work that ping pongs between the lyrical and economical. I find myself wishing he would write more when he writes less, and vice versa. The man will spend a page
describing a limestone overhang in the light of the moon, and afford a main character a three sentence death. Finding themes mitigates this because McCarthy strikes many as an author who carefully chooses his words. Whenever a character gives a long speech, it is often giving you clues about what to think about in the greater context of the novel. Without trying to sound like some know-it-all, I'll offer one question to the negative reviewers at large: What does carrying the fire mean?
Anyway, I had to go to bat for McCarthy. I hope this might convince some people to give this novel a second look, or at least give the author a second chance.
Book Review: Haunted
Summary: 4 Stars
I've liked post-apocalyptic fiction since junior high. When I was fifteen, I saw "The Omega Man" twelve times. (Yeah, I thought Rosalind Cash was hot, but that only had a little to do with it.) I would sometimes reflect on why I enjoyed the genre so. Was it because I enjoyed the idea of the human race being nearly wiped out? Nah. I like people, for the most part. I suppose what attracted me most to the stuff was much the same as what attracts folks to westerns: the rugged individual prevails against overwhelming odds, and preserves hope for his town, his country, or humanity itself. It was the adventure element of the genre, and the underdog standing of the typical post-apocalypse protagonist, that lured me. But then, I always wondered: Why doesn't the end or near end of humanity bother me, even in a fictional context? Am I secretly anti-social? Or, am I simply a mean dude wrapped in a veneer of civility? I harbored a mild conflict between enjoyment and vague guilt when reading or watching the end of the world, but I suppose that conflict only added spice to the allure.
There was, and is, another element: the need to face my fears, especially fears that lurked in shadow. I grew up in a time when nuclear conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was an all-too-real possibility. I remember the drills in elementary school, and I remember the thoughts that would come to me as I sat beneath my school desk. They were thoughts like, "If this was for real, I might never see my mom, dad, sister, or dog again." How much did those years emotionally brand folks of my generation? What lingers in the heart and the guts? I don't know. But I do know that I feel sorrow that we had to spend our childhoods with an awareness that we could be incinerated before the day ended. How very sad. Our biggest worry should have been whether we'd get grounded for some misdeed upon returning home from school.
Anyway, I came upon "The Road" while browsing post-apocalypse novels on Amazon. Now, I'm a bit of a contrary son-of-a-gun. I've never rushed out to buy a book upon learning it was awarded any prize, and I don't like it when Oprah tells me what to do. But sheesh, a post-apocalypse novel winning the Pulitzer Prize? How does that happen? I ordered the book.
I didn't know much about McCarthy before buying "The Road." So, I was distracted by his tendency to avoid punctuation, flaunt basic rules of grammar, and leave out quotation marks in dialogue. My thought was, "Sheesh, I guess I'm really lacking in sophistication. This guy is held up as a 'modern master,' but to me, he comes across as lazy. For cryin' out loud, is it really that much harder to type CAN'T instead of CANT?"
What carried me along, though, were contrasting elements of the story. The man and boy struggle to survive in a grey, desolate world, where the only food available is what can be scavenged. They're heading south, because the man knows that he and his son cannot survive another winter in the north. The world seems utterly without hope. And yet, hope lives, tenaciously, in the love between father and son. The brutal, horrific portrayals of the world and its remaining inhabitants only serve to spotlight the connection between the boy and his dad. McCarthy writes, "Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire."
Then ending of the novel, safe to say, ain't stock Hollywood. I finished the novel with conflicting feelings. The story was compelling, and yet I had some regret that I'd even started it. Through much of the book, the writer's disregard of grammar rules and conventions was distracting, and yet somehow added to the bleak tone of the book, to the sense of utter desolation. McCarthy wasn't motivated to make this an easy read, especially in an emotional sense. The reader never gets off the hook. Escapist fare, it isn't. Truth be told, for much of the novel, I tended to side more with the two and three-star reviewers on Amazon than those who gushed over the novel. But time has changed my perspective. Early in the novel, it was a glass half-empty. Now, days after finishing it, it's a glass half-full.
Is "The Road" a good book? Do I recommend it? I don't know. I really can't say. It's haunted me too much to be objective about it. Since I've read it, I think often about when my son was a newborn. He was born healthy and robust, but suddenly, I became hyper-aware of how much I had to lose. Worries of SIDS and other agents of the Grim Reaper circled about in my mind, like vultures with blood-soaked beaks. He slept with us as an infant, and I would often sit awake at night and watch his little chest rise and fall, all the while thinking, "Please, God, just let him keep breathing."
I've been cursing "The Road" since I finished it. But last night, I started reading it again. I'm thinking that if I re-read it, I might chase away the shadows it's left in my heart.
Book Review: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
Summary: 2 Stars
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"
I give the author the benefit of the doubt, and don't think that he even attempted to picture a realistic post-apocalyptic world. As his is nothing of the kind.
There is no disaster imaginable that would kill the seeds in the ground, nearly all the plants, plants that can stay alive in such severe conditions and require only little sunlight, the fishes in the sea and in the lakes, all the birds in the sky, all the mammalians that can feed on grass and leaves... and yet leave human beings alive in such numbers, that the main characters in the book come across other humans so frequently, in grey abandoned environments.
It is also difficult to imagine how all the infrastructure of an organized society, like power plants that can sustain strikes of jumbo jets would permanently go out of function, while grocery stores and abandoned farm houses stay intact.
McCarthy's world is forever covered in grey inertia (many years after "whatever happened"), and there aren't going to be rains that would gradually wash the ashes away, winds that would start clearing the landscape or the skies, no green to one day raise from a fertile ground.
The world of this metaphorical story is therefore, and quite clearly I would add, more of an alternate/allegorical reality, like Dante's Inferno (or that of a persistent Biblical flood), but there is no Purgatory in McCarthy's version, and no Paradiso even in a glimpse of a dream. No poetic images of Beatrice here. The story forever stuck on the 9th Circle of Hell.
I don't know whether McCarthy was influenced by Dante, but his humans, who in their alternate unnatural world only feed on other human beings, hidden caches of food or rare rotten apples, turn into portraits of Dante's Count Ugolino who gnaws on the head of his rival Archbishop Ruggieri.
The characters of the alternate world don't either follow the logic and behaviour of our natural world. During great famines Ukraine, China, Ethiopia in the 20th century, that killed millions of people, cases of cannibalism were rare exceptions, not the prevalent occurrence that McCarthy portrays them into. His "bad people" have lost all their humanity, and have transformed into demons in empty human shells.
Compare McCarthy's world devoid of warm colours to the words of Mr Tsutomu Yamaguchi, "the luckiest or unluckiest man in the world", a rare survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who 60 years later notes: "I have hope for the future." "I believe in love, in human beings"
There are no such redeeming qualities on offer in this book, no hope, no dreams. Those evolutionary wired qualities that during man's journey on earth have so many times pushed mankind through bottlenecks, and into new hope-filled beginnings.. The man and the boy never dream, never talk of a better tomorrow. And when, suffering from cold, severe starvation - and the man from something like pneumonia - they find their only glimpse of light, an abandoned bunker filled from floor to the roof with food, gasoline, water tanks to last them the whole winter and longer, they only stay for a few days despite the deadly dangers outside. The explanation McCarthy gives for them turning their backs on this temporary salvation, without even taking the time to heal themselves is as illogical as the rest of the book.
The man is afraid that "bad people" could any moment find the shelter that the man and the boy were the first humans to come across in the years since "whatever happened".
That moment an obsession (reaching south) starts to over shadow the prospects of his own survival or that of his son and the story starts losing what inner logic it had left.
The author is hell-bent to not allow even a small phoenix to be re-born from these ashes.
I don't see this book as the great story of hope or parental love or other such things the book is so lavishly praised to represent and I think this was one of the least deserving Pulitzer prize winners in history.
Of course our views are subjective, but comparing this book to some classics in which disaster struck people are portrayed (such as Albert Camus's sublime novel The Plague) I can't but recall Arthur Koestler's words from the last chapter of Book I in The Act of Creation:
"When he Reads Kierkekaard[substitute a famous author or a thinker], he is not moved by what he reads, he is moved by himself reading Kierkegaard - but he is blissfully unaware of it. His emotions do not derive from the object, but from extraneous sources associated with it; his satisfactions are pseudo-satisfactions, his triumphs self-delusions. He has never travelled in the belly of a whale; he has opted for the comforts of sterility against the pangs of creativity."
Book Review: A Dark, Lyrical Meditation on Love's Dedication
Summary: 5 Stars
"The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it."
"...Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland."
I neither buy nor read collections of poetry. I can count the poems I know, at least the non-limerick ones, on a single hand. I'm not a fan of poetry, and I truly see much of it as overblown, a good thing taken to a ridiculously inflated extreme. This book isn't poetry, but it's also not pure narrative. It's somewhere in the gray between, and I enjoyed every single page of it.
McCarthy had me on the 14th line when I read "granitic beast." No, I didn't have to be told this was a reference to stone. Its use here, early in the work, deliberate, familiar yet uncommon, communicated to me exactly what this book would be about, and more importantly how it would be told, and I couldn't wait to ingest it. The contemplated and intentional use of this word in this place told me of texture and color and temperature, and its context told me of fear, uncertainty, cruelty, and the close specter of menace. I was hooked before the first page was done.
I enjoyed this book's writing style immensely, its story simple and told in a manner that came to me clearly, instantly creating depth with a minimum of prose. Words like "envaccuuming," and phrases like "isocline of death" were absolutely brilliant--I bite my hand melodramatically wishing I'd written them. This highly evocative austerity was mirrored in the father's and the son's conversations, in which so little was said, but in which I was seeing absolutely clearly the cant of a head, a look in the eyes, the faintest curl of smile. I was reminded very happily of the magnificent work of James Dickey, especially To the White Sea.
And the wonderfully lyrical story unfolded. No, I didn't need quotation marks or crucial apostrophes. There was never any question what was happening, who was saying what or where the story was headed. Honestly, do they care about proper punctuation in the wasteland? I didn't miss a thing, and the modestly different narrative presentation didn't faze me in the least. In fact, it reminded me instantly of e e cummings. Ah, reluctantly back to poetry. Later on when the pair made it to the sea, and the prose touched on "...shuttling..," instantly T. S. Eliot's classic came to mind.
I very much enjoyed the father, an object lesson in survival and just what that takes. He not only was educated, but also remembered it and knew how and when to apply it. He was inventive, attentive and observant, and deliberately learned from every experience. He anticipated, adapted and showed the courage to take immediate action, having thought through consequences beforehand. He was no MacGyver, but from the opening minutes of the crisis he knew what was at hand; his survival, and his son's, were due to his seriousness and intelligence and his application of them.
This book is not about the end of the world. It's not about nuclear winter, man's inevitable murder of the planet, the inherent barbarity of man, none of that. This book is about the only thing that matters, a parent's love for a child, and what at the absolutely basic level of survival you can and cannot do for those whom you treasure most, what you will go through and what you must decide upon for them to have all they need and deserve. This book is about the rapture and the agony of parenthood. It took me two nights to read this book, and both nights after midnight when I reluctantly put it down, I went upstairs to re-tuck-in my daughter and my son, and to kiss them in their sleep, through the silent tears of adoration this book brought forth.
This unpleasantly dark, ominous book reminded me of a few crucial things: My daughter and my son are the most incredible and important things I have ever done or will ever do. Their well-being is never assured, and I can never, ever stop looking out for them and teaching them what I know of their world. One day I will move on, and they must be ready when that happens.
Bottom line: This is not a cheery, happy, frothy and light read. It is cold and hard and painful. But there is joy in it. Be ecstatic it is only a story, that tonight you sleep in a bed in a house, with food, water, and your dog on the hearth. Be aware of and happy that you are reading this expertly rendered, a magnificently crafted work of highly evocative prose, and look forward to the next one, whatever the subject.