The Road - Cormac McCarthy

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy is not a book for Grandmas. Not my Grandma anyway. I was reading it on a car journey, and before long she had taken it out of my hands and asked to borrow it. She's a magpie so it's a little miracle that she did ask me - my copy of 'The Great Gatsby' had already mysteriously turned up in her house. I'm sorry to say that I firmly refused. The novel is many things: incredible, harrowing, thought-provoking, and unsettling…but appealing for Grandmas it is not.

McCarthy's magnificent imagination sees the American continent reduced to a husk of our present day USA, after an unspecified disaster which wipes out much of mankind. The unforgiving and sinister post-Apocalyptic landscape, though so far from the skyscrapers and shopping malls of the privileged West of today, is completely believable. This is a work of fiction, but it is as though McCarthy has only had to stretch a few years into the future towards which we are all inevitably headed. Therein lies its power. The unspecified nature of the attack, the disorienting lack of geographical landmarks and the nameless protagonists make this story take the form of an a terrifyingly accurate window into the future of the Everyman, woman and child.

Though anonymous, the main characters of 'the man' and 'the boy' are completely captivating. Father and son, they could be anyone - and yet their incisive, sparse dialogue conveys such emotion that many readers have been, and will be, brought to tears. Their relationship is about as convincingly real as any I've read and the boy is childlike without proving annoying. Their familiarity breeds conversations which tend to loop and circle back around the same ideas; the boy is especially worried that they should, whilst fighting to survive in a hostile land, remain 'the good guys'. 

As the novel progresses, fixed notions of 'good' and 'bad' become a little crooked, a little unhinged. The only rules that seem to remain are 'steal to survive' and 'kill or be killed'. There are a few scenes invested with such power as to be heartbreaking: every time the son is left with a revolver and instructions on how to commit suicide if anyone should approach him; and a scene where the 'good guy' status of the man (which the reader has been counting on almost as much as the boy) is blurred. You come to realise that there are no heroes here - the anonymity of the man and child ensures no eponymous legend will be born from this tale. 

 In 2007, the novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction - what can I do but give it 5 stars!?

My verdict: It's so good! I wish I'd read this before taking my Literary Criticism exam at university, as this novel would make a perfect study for the emerging field of Ecocriticism. There is so much to say about this novel's startling vision of a world thrown 100 years into an unrecognisable future.