This is the story of a man and a boy in the aftermath of what you assume is a nuclear holocaust. The weather is getting colder and the two are travelling south down what you assume is the eastern seaboard of the US. They have to contend with starvation, the cold and the bare handful of other survivors.
It’s a darkly engaging story. The two characters spend most of the time balancing on a knife edge of survival. They survive by assiduously searching every building they find – and by sheer good luck. Their encounters with others are brief and stressful. There are a couple of moments of horror involving cannibalism.
The Road is written in a very stylistic manner – it’s spare and bleak; the main character and his son have no names – they are just ‘the man’ and ‘the boy’ or ‘the child’. There are no chapters; instead, the narrative is split into short sections of no more than a couple of pages – some are just a paragraph. There are few adjectives – most things are described as being ‘gray’ or ‘dead’. Sentences are short. Some are just nouns. Descriptions. But then there are occasional passages that feel horribly over-written, full of abstruse vocabulary, and they’re difficult to even make sense of.
Just as the writing style is very bare, the interactions between the characters are minimal. The man is a tired and doubting father. His son questions the veracity of what he tells him, and the man often has to agree that, for instance, maybe things aren’t OK. Their exchanges are a series of short, un-quotation-marked sentences, often repeating what each other say, inflecting statements as questions and vice versa.
The man regards everyone they encounter as a risk – rightly so, mostly. By the end, however, he is starting to seem obsessive, psychotic, even, in the extent to which he tries to avoid others.
The ending is what I was taught to call a dramatic ending. The negative part of the ending was signposted throughout and seemed inevitable and apt. The positive aspect of the conclusion comes from sheer good luck and has no foreshadowing. It seems like a happy ending simply added to prevent the novel being utterly bleak and depressing. That said, you could read it as a terribly ominous ending, but that wasn’t the impression I got.
With the exception of its awkwardly optmistic ending, the bursts of pretentious verbiage and some questions as to why, if they’ve lived for several years since the apocalypse, they need to make this urgent journey and haven’t encountered any orderly community yet, The Road was an excellent book – realistic, harrowing but hopeful and beautifully written.
Loved all the McCarthy books I have read, from ‘All the Pretty Horses’ to ‘No Country for Old Men’ – easier to read than see, have not read ‘The Road’ yet, waiting for the right time, but read an interesting interview with him about it. A great writer.
The Road is the only thing I’ve read by McCarthy and I certainly liked it. I wouldn’t be against reading more by him.