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Brittany
Miserable yet uplifiting
What if you were following a road, not knowing what you’d find, where you were going, or who you might meet? The earth as you once knew it has changed. It is cold, lifeless, and the sun shines no more. Everything is covered by the thick ash that remains after a sudden cataclysm which forever changes the lives of a father and his son.
Perhaps a world such as this is hard to imagine, but not when you begin to read novelist Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning fiction novel The Road. His writing allows you to taste the dryness and feel the pang of hunger. It is filled with detail and flows like poetry. This is why it is so suspenseful and frightening. You can picture the post-apocalyptic world as if you were watching a film or even experiencing it first hand.
In fact, that’s just how The Road came about. McCarthy had a vision while visiting El Paso, Texas with his young son. He imagined the city in the future and pictured “fires on the hill” all the while thinking about his son, John Francis McCarthy, whom the novel is dedicated to.
What’s interesting about the story is that there are basically two characters. These characters are referred to as “the man” and “the boy.” I think that by choosing to leave them nameless helps you, the reader, connect with them more. They do not have names, but what matters most is that they have each other.
The father and son are on a journey across hell on earth with nothing but the clothes on their back, some canned food, and a pistol with just two bullets left. The only thing they can do is keep moving with the uncertainty if reaching their destination will mean safety or death.
Along the way they experience some ungodly encounters and horrific sights. Meanwhile the pair always remained “the good guys” when other survivors resorted to enslaving, stealing, murder, and cannibalism.
The man tries to protect his son with all of his being, but realizes he can’t shield him from seeing such traumatizing events. All he cares about is keeping him safe and alive any way he can. What father wouldn’t? At one point in the story he tells his son that “if you died, I would want to die too.” There is no greater love than a parent for their child.
The boy is forced to grow up and become wise upon his years. His childhood had been stripped from him and the father does what he can to try to bring a smile to his face. The boy is also always ready to help people they come across while journeying along the road. He is very caring and compassionate towards people in need and totally disregards that he himself is in need too. This really leads to some “awe” moments. Especially when he tells his dad “you drink some first papa, you eat” when they are both starving and sickly.
I feel that men and women alike will enjoy this book. Its different then any book I’ve ever read and I enjoyed the change. The story keeps you at the edge of your seat and it’s almost unbearable. Yet somehow McCarthy keeps you hopeful and even inspires you to have courage and keep hold of faith.
Ultimately, The Road tells an unforgettable tale of a father and son desperately struggling for survival. You’ll find yourself turning page after page because you just have to know that they’ll be alright. You’ll question the motives of others, but never doubt the love and courage of “the good guys” who will always “carry the fire.”
Tyler Bender
Book Review: The Road
Imagine a world torn by fire and ravaged “by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes” where an ashen landscape is the backdrop for the journey of a father and his son seeking salvation and carrying a small hope that there’s still an untainted place of good left on this earth. This journey is told so terrifyingly horribly and yet so realistically by Cormac McCarthy in The Road.
The father and son are never named other than the man and boy in the story and this style makes them seem closer together, it makes you believe in them, like they’re somebody you know or somebody you could know. McCarthy makes you like them because they are “the good guys” that are “carrying the fire” of hope and salvation in a world of ash and evil. In this post-apocalyptic world where hydrangeas and wild orchids are “ashen effigies” of themselves where marching bands of cannibalistic gangs loot the land where buildings are melted and tipped with the windows like icing where interstates are filled with long lines of charred and rusting cars, the two are “each others world entire” and only survive together.
The story line revolves around the journey of a man and his son traveling to the sea with a revolver with two bullets, a cart filled with a couple blankets and some canned food and each other, but there’s always something going on some sort of trouble and tension between everything else in this barren scorched landscape.
Even though the boy is the only thing keeping the father going and the world is so horrible that the father would rather have the son, his son commit suicide rather than be captured and eaten or forced to be a catamite of these marauding bands. The boy’s mother couldn’t handle a world like this and killed herself while the boy was still very young. The world is ugly and full of ash but the love that McCarthy creates between the man and the boy makes you believe that there’s still some good left in the world and that they will reach salvation. The father says “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world”.
The first time I read it I didn’t really like this book, but I read it again and I really started to like The Road. I liked it because of McCarthy’s style of writing, the love the man and boy have for each other, and how they over come all these hardships together and still have hope of a better world. McCarthy’s style of writing is nothing like I’ve ever read before and I like it, it’s poetic. His story is a story of love and many horrifying hardships of a man and a boy journeying through a land blasted by some apocalypse some years ago. You should read it and think. Just think.
Nancy Jones
Not the Greatest book Despite Oprah's Recommendation
I love these type of books, sci fi, end of the world themes. However, this book was so poorly written. There was almost no dialogue. The characterizations were relatively poor, father/son type. Father will do anything for son, blah blah blah. Nothing made these characters that unique. They were stereotypes. Mostly, the book was just description, Endless scenery. And the reason for the apocalypse. What caused the end of the world clearly specified. Trees fell, uprooted from the ground. What would cause such a thing? I guess you can use your imagination. I wish the author had used a little more imagination coming up with dialogue for the characters and reasons for the 'end of the world'. When I thought the novel might have a unique twist given when the wife/mother character was talking to the dad, she said something about hating to be alone, how she would nurture the relationship of a person even if the person were not real, I was totally wrong. There is no unique twist or theme. Again, father willing to do anything for son: It would be so much more unique if the author had made the characters more than silent stereotypes.
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