Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road is the post-apocalyptic story of a father and son and their journey across the future wasteland of America.
I’ve read quite a few novels that are set after the apocalypse. Where the end of the world has essentially happened—either by nuclear bomb, or virus, or climate change—and those few who survived struggle in the aftermath. So, there wasn’t anything new to me about the basic premise of the story. However, very few of those previous works were written by an author with as audacious a vocabulary and as nuanced a turn of phrase as Cormac McCarthy.
His language is very spare and direct, and yet he uses words and sentence constructions that are incredibly rich and indelible.
The horrors that the two main characters endure, and the harsh decisions they must from time to time make are depicted in distinctly compelling prose. And believe me, they do come across some horrors.
If I do have a reservation about the novel at all it stems from a single passage on page 87 that seems to me to be written by a different narrator than the others. I don’t know if I am simply not understanding this passage, or if there is a mistake, but where the rest of the novel appears to be told in third-person narrative fashion, this passage is told in first-person. So, like I say, it may simply be an error or something. Maybe someone forgot to find-replace the instances of “I” to “he.” But that reservation is minor, and I enjoyed the book very much.
The trade paperback edition I read was 287 pages long, but the typeface is large and there is a lot of white space on the page. Certainly no one should be intimidated by the length.
This is the first novel I have read by Cormac McCarthy, but I will now strongly consider reading some of his other novels. I hope that, if you choose to read it, you enjoy it as much as I did.
