The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Reviews of The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: Bleak, Bewitching and Remarkable
Summary: 5 Stars
I guess I'm in one of those post-apocalyptic moods. Venturing to the library these two weeks ago, I picked up two titles with similar subjects - "The Pesthouse" by Jim Crace (which I am readying to read) and "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Having never read any of McCarthy's novels before this, I was a bit concerned that his literary method wouldn't hold my attention. Instead, it grabbed me by my shirt collar and hauled me into a willful surrender.
"The Road" depicts time and again an anemic wasteland, full of ash and smoke, blackened vegetation and little sight of sun or sky, the heavens veiled in ominous cloud cover. Surviving in this land of pervasive soot are a father and his son; we never know their names, yet we are deeply ensconced in the terror and uncertainty that is their reality, the world utterly and completely destroyed by an unnamed disaster. With scant natural resources (food, water) and no modern conveniences available (electricity, plumbing, gasoline for cars), father and son are living a primitive and base lifestyle. Complicating their struggle is the evolution of this scorched planet into a veritable battleground - it is kill or be killed for those left roaming the emptiness and anything that may aid in their hollow cling to life is fought over tooth and nail. Every new day may yet be a wasted attempt, the bleak condition of the world leaving little point to life; it is an inevasible pondering which has the son asking his father time and again, "Are we going to die?"
McCarthy's distinctive style of writing is his disjointed, incomplete sentences that remain easy to understand and at times are sage-like in their contemplation:
"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." (pg. 168)
His description is majestic and mesmerizing, conjuring the worst imaginable environs and the most demoralized of people:
"By then all the stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out 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." (pgs. 180-181)
Once started, "The Road" can barely be put down, a riveting read that is regrettably short at only 287 pages. The book contains no chapters but there are several convenient stopping points marked by an ellipsis or short, widely spaced paragraphs. Strangely enough, it's lacking in punctuation here and there, such as in compound words like "didn't" and "wasn't" (they appear instead as "didnt" and "wasnt"). There are also no quotations when characters are conversing and if one is not paying attention, one can forget easily just who is speaking.
Bottom line: No more can be said about "The Road"; the appeal to read it would be lost on one too many reveals and/or conjecturing on the plot, the dark adventure on which a reader embarks indelibly spoiled. Pick it up today at your local bookstore or library - it will be one of the best novels you read this year.
Book Review: The Polished Stones of Lost Beauty
Summary: 4 Stars
This post-apocalyptic landscape is told in black and white. No names, either of the father and son, or the geography, or the cities or roads. Here is precision of language. McCarthy is not going to provide people or landscapes, so he needs to be clear about the descriptions rendered. "Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world (3)."
He uses words like stones, each one weighted, not laid to form a path but falling away into nothingness. He uses stone itself in those first pages: "wet, flowstone walls...granitic beast...stone flues...great stone room...alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it."
When there is conversation between the man and boy, it is as bony as the characters:
Did you have any friends?
Yes. I did.
Lots of them?
Yes.
Where are we going?
We're going south.
Okay.
Poetry, but more an ancient music, plainsong. This could be the Neanderthal world of William Golding's The Inheritors, in which a new idea was simply "?"
McCarthy matches with exquisite skill the emotional provenance to the prose. It could have been unreadable if McCarthy had written...And then they...and then...and then. The reader sees (and smells) only a few things: the shopping cart, the plastic tarps, the stench of their clothes and blankets. When the father and son hide from other walkers, the Bad, the cart is left near the road. McCarthy heightens the tension--will they be discovered and killed--by adding that cart. The reader's vision is so reduced that the cart is a physical extension of their bodies. It must be safely hauled back to the road.
When the man and boy find the old bunker stocked with food, color breaks into the narrative and brings a relief more visceral than intellectual. A green metal shade. Fruit. Vegetables. Coffee. Spaghetti sauce. He doesn't describe the colors on the labels. He simply names the food and we see the colors as the man and boy saw them.
This is the break that permits the reader to take a deep breath. One of two things is going to happen: the two will eat, clean up and get their bearings then resume the adventure; or, the Bad will find them and wreak more excruciating havoc because the stakes have been raised. The two move on with the possibility of hope.
In a sense, the larger world of The Road is revealed through negative space. McCarthy says:
The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of goods in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along the sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. (181)
But McCarthy is, in fact remembering beauty and love and security, simply by describing the horrors in detail, then refusing to allow this man and boy to be corrupted. They will not kill and cannibalize. They will remember reading, remember colors, remember the mother. They will hold the flame.
In a sense, the impact of the book is all craft--not plotting, not character development. The vocabulary honed, the paragraph breaks deliberate, the slow pacing mimicking the progress of the man and boy.
The Road is the work of a lifetime: placing each polished word, pacing the steps, creating a world. A masterpiece.
Book Review: The future is now...
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Road" is a work of stunning, savage, heartbreaking beauty. Set in the post-apocalyptic hell of an unending nuclear winter, Cormac McCarthy writes about a nameless man and his young son, wandering through a world gone crazy; bleak, cold, dark, where the snow falls down gray; moving south toward the coast, looking somewhere, anywhere, for life and warmth. Nothing grows in this blasted world; people turn into cannibals to survive. We don't know if we're looking at the aftermath of a nuclear war, or maybe an extinction level event -- an asteroid or a comet; McCarthy deliberately doesn't tell us, and we come to realize it doesn't matter anyway. Whether man or nature threw a wild pitch, the world is just as dead.
The boy's mother is a suicide, unable to face living in a world where everything's gone gray and dead. Keep on living and you'll end up raped and murdered along with everybody else, she tells the man before she eats a bullet. The man and his son are "each the other's world entire"; they have only each other, they live for each other, and their intense love for each other will help them survive. At least for a while.
But survival in this brave new world is a dicey prospect at best; the boy and the man are subjected to sights no one should ever have to see. Every day is a scavenger hunt for food and shelter and safety from the "bad guys", the marauding gangs who enslave the weak and resort to cannibalism for lack of any other food. We are the good guys, the man assures his son. Yet in their rare encounters with other living human beings, the man resorts to primitive survivalism, refusing help to a lost child and a starving man, living only for himself and his son, who is trying to hold onto whatever humanity he has left. It's in these chance encounters with other people, even more than their interaction with each other, that we see them for who they really are. The boy is a radiantly sweet child, caring, unselfish, wanting and needing to reach out to others, even though this bleak, blasted world is the only environment he's ever known; the father, more cautious, more bitter, has let the devastation enwrap him until all he cares about is himself and his son. And to hell with everybody else.
Their journey to the coast is an unending nightmare through the depths of hell and the only thing that holds them together is their love for each other. When one is ready to give up, the other refuses to let him. I won't let you go into the darkness alone, the man reassures his son. But ultimately, as the boy finds out, everyone is on his own, and all you can do is keep on keeping on.
McCarthy has proven himself a master of minimalism; with a style as bleak as the stripped terrain the man and the boy travel through, but each sentence polished as a gem, he takes us into the harsh reality of a dying world. The past is gone, dead as the landscape all around them, and the present is the only reality. There is no later, McCarthy says. This is later. Deep down the man knows there is nothing better to hope for down the road, even though he keeps them both slogging down it, only to keep his son alive. And we keep slogging down that road with them, hoping against hope that around the next corner or five miles down the line, maybe there is something, anything, to make survival worth while.
Living in such a hell, why would anyone want to survive? The mother made her decision; she checked out long ago. We come to the end of this book totally drained, enervated, devastated, but curiously uplifted. Because as long as there is love, McCarthy tells us, maybe there is something to live for, and as the book shows us at the end, maybe there is a even little bit of hope.
Judy Lind
Book Review: Overwrought and Over-reviewed
Summary: 1 Stars
I was compelled by the genre that this book purported to fall into coupled with the fact that it won the Pulitzer Prize. I because of the later, I wasn't expecting "The Road Warrior" or anything, but what I was expecting was something of worth. That's most definitely not what I got.
The entire narrative left me with a handful of words consistently popping to mind, in no particular order: grey, okay, ash, cart, cold, starving. There are more, but they are equally as dreary.
Much of this "story" is a bleak road picture following a man and a boy south to get warmer after some cataclysm of global proportions wipes out most life. The main problem is that there are inconsistencies in the narrative, and with no plot (which is fine) and with what seems to be a choice not to punctuate properly (some but not all apostrophes and all quotation marks are missing), events such as finding an amazing cache of food in one scene, to be nearly starving again only pages later, then pages after that producing a can of peaches that he and the boy share in the cold. An awful lot of time is spent traveling south and quickly searching houses for supplies, but nearly four days are spent searching a boat, the man wracking his brain for helpful insight of where one might hide food or supplies on such a vessel.
My guess is that this book is intended to be entirely metaphorical. I surmised at one point that the man and the boy as well as some other characters that appear are all meant to be parts of the same psyche; letting cynicism and paranoia die in favor of innocence and hope, even if naive hope is the best that can be arrived at. Perhaps the child represents the future, potential, and the man represents the present, stagnation. There is an "old man" character that pops up seeming to reinforce this hypothesis, perhaps representing the past, acquiescence, and blind acceptance, but then one must wonder why the same number of pages are devoted to description of cannibal slave-driver soldiers that the man and boy hide from. Not only that, but such encounters seem to reinforce the man's reluctance to stop and trust other people to protect the boy. If the story is a metaphor, what is it meant to illustrate?
Moral ambiguity abounds, but it is pointed out as much more serious than one the circumstances dictate. The man kills another, clearly malevolent person, to protect the boy. No pontification, but time is spent with the man trying to rationalize this with the boy. Rationalization is made for taking food from abandoned houses, but not from abandoned supermarkets or from dried and abandoned apple orchards.
Personally, I believe that the boy is not the man's son, but that he has taken the boy as his responsibility following the suicidal death of the man's wife. She gives birth to a son and kills herself after the cataclysm, but tells him that he must face reality - that he could never take care of the baby himself in this horrible world they are faced with. The boy could be his son, but it doesn't need to be, at least not biologically. The drive of the man is to prove this woman, the love of his life that he has lost, wrong. To this end, poor planning on his part, and a deadly condition leaving him with limited time in which to do this, leads to stumbling along "the road" and into dangerous situations and near calamity.
I can only recommend this book to aspiring writers wanting to know what it takes to win the Pulitzer Prize. Clearly, punctuation, plot, character development and consistent narrative aren't necessary, but drawing vague metaphors regarding human nature and the declination of western society are encouraged.
Lame.
Book Review: audiobook review
Summary: 2 Stars
So, here's my first review of anything on Amazon, hopefully I can make some sense.
First off, if you are looking at reading this because it has been tagged as post apocalyptic fiction, and you like that type of story, you might want to think twice about this one. I have read numerous books in that genre, and like that type of fiction, but this one is probably not what you are looking for. With that said, it is somewhat in that genre, but the post apocalyptic world really isn't the point of the book.
Like many others, I ended up trying this book out because of all the good reviews it has garnered. I also got a new GPS that included 2 downloads for audio books, so this was one I chose.
I have read a good bit of the pros/cons of the writing style used here, but since this was an audiobook, many of the issues people had with the style weren't as obvious. Personally, if you have any concerns about the odd writing style, try out the audio version. I'll bet many local libraries would have it available, so you wouldn't need to worry about the expense of an audiobook. Besides, if you think this is a tough one to read, go try Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker".
As for why I gave the book only 2 stars; basically because to me, it was boring beyond belief. This is the gist of the book as I saw it (although sometimes they happened in a different order):
We are starving
We are in danger, but miraculously get out of it
We find food, again miraculously
Boy convinces father to help someone
We are starving
Rinse, repeat... until the end, which really, is not uplifting in the least, but at least its different than the rest of the book.
I'm sure I will get some people trying to tell me I just didn't get it, that there are all sorts of hidden meanings; in the way it was written; in the way the conversations went; in how the imagery meant this or that; and God knows what else. To me, a good book needs to have at least some of those meanings explored. Otherwise, everything is guesswork, and you really have no idea what those hidden meanings actually do mean. How can you enjoy a book if the entire time you are reading it, you are guessing if the author is trying to hide a meaning in something? Be honest, those that have given the book a good review and said that there are all these hidden meanings - do you really know that, do you really think you got all those meanings? Or are you just trying to justify why this book should be praised so highly by pretending to "get" it?
Also, I might have been able to see some of the meanings and imagery, but the boring, repetitive nature of the whole book overshadowed everything else so much, that I ended up just wanting it to be over.
For example, to me, the complete bleakness of the world can be looked at 2 ways (and yes, I can understand either point). It was either a really easy out for the author - hell, why try to paint a worthwhile background? Let's just make it always the same, easier to write it that way. Or; it was done that way to deftly portray just how bleak and desolate the world had become without that overshadowing the more important story of the father and son.
If the story of the father and son was really fleshed out more, with much more to that story that led to at least a partial understanding of what happened to the world to make it as bleak as it is, then I could accept the second idea. However, since that story was just as desolate in what was said and done (other than a few places here and there), it just made the lack of the other imagery stand out that much more (which, in this case, is not a good thing).