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On The Road Again


Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is set in a grim future where sunlight is blotted out by dark ash clouds. All bird and animal life dead. No history. No future. Cold winds tear at the tattered rags of a man and his son, walking the road, their filthy possessions in a squeaking grocery cart, waywardly following a worn, torn map to someplace near the coast that might be warm.

As they watch unspeakable horror, all the two have is each other.

No chapters. No headings. Just sharply drawn vignettes of life on that grim road. Vignettes that, in McCarthy’s stingy language, offer us the pure essence of humanity in the ruins.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy (Vintage International, 287 pp)

2 comments

1 Linda { 06.09.07 at 1:43 pm }

But what did you think about the book? I found it repetitious, predictible, and a little boring. Will we really all devolve into a ‘kill or be killed’ culture? That seems to be one of McCarthy’s premises, at least until the “good guys” show up at the very end. I’d like to believe humanity is a little more caring of one another than that. But maybe that is his point?

I found Nevil Shute’s ‘On the Beach’ much more compelling, but that was a generation or two ago. Maybe this generation does need its own wakeup call.

2 Leland { 06.12.07 at 6:55 am }

Linda, I thought I was showing how much I liked the book by trying to emulate McCarthy’s style. Obviously, I need to work on that :)

I really loved the book. I’m trying to learn to use less words to say more, and McCarthy is a master of that. I revel in his prose.

And, ironically, I liked the book because it reminded me of On the Beach, which was probably, at age 13, my first science-fiction novel. (Did you read it back then, too?)

Would what’s left of us devolve into a kill or be killed culture? Beats me, but my cynical nature says probably so. That’s why I found the relationship between the man, who we know is going to die, and the boy, who we know won’t, so compelling. In the face of depravity, they maintained their basic humanity.

I’m reading another McCarthy novel, Blood Meridian, which, like The Road, I find grimly and wonderfully compelling.

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