The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2008 of the 2006 publication)
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cormac McCarthyEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05
ISBN: 0307472124
Number of pages: 287
Publisher: Vintage International
Book Reviews of The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2008 of the 2006 publication)
Book Review: A hauntingly beautiful read
Summary: 5 Stars
The Road is a harrowing tale of a man and his son as they travel through a post-apocalyptic world south to the sea. Having lost his wife to despair and suicide, the man is determined to ensure the safety of his boy in the face of starvation and predatory bands of fellow travelers.
As an allegory of the journey we're all making on the road through life, the book delivers a Manichean view of those who are "good guys" and the "bad." And bad they are: with food virtually nonexistent in this post-nuclear-holocaust landscape, cannibalism is rampant; the mores of the past live only in dreams; and every person the man and boy meet carries with him no social bonding or brotherhood, but the threat of extinction.
What makes McCarthy's book so compelling is less the narrative -- often, the simple storyline is preoccupied with the most mundane acts of survival -- but the language and vocabulary he uses. "All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain," thinks the man, a phrase which seems to summon up the zeitgeist of this dark world in one sentence. While observing his young son, the man thinks, "He seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves." Even the simplest description of a jar full of precious water is rendered with startling beauty: "The water was so clear. He held it to the light. A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some slow hydraulic axis."
In a world of such desolation, memories and dreams take on strange powers: "Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from . " And why would you want to? ". . . Memory of her (his dead wife) crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not." Even the physical landscape, covered in ash, takes on the incorporeal nature of dreams: "In the evening the murky shape of another coastal city, the cluster of tall buildings vaguely askew. He thought the iron armatures had softened in the heat and then reset again to leave the buildings standing out of true. The melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a cake."
The tight sentences and the pinpoint accuracy of words -- often, excruciatingly technical in their essence -- seems like a vainglorious attempt by the man to set himself in, and to understand this bleak landscape. Sentences lack subjects; punctuation falls away; even verbs flee the prose. They're not needed to render the bare truth of things. It's as if by naming the parts of a bridge, for example, he can understand more than its physicality, and get to the seed of its being, its Platonic form. McCarthy's language brings to mind Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, where every word has been chiseled and sharpened like flint, or burnished like brass. "Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains . . ." he says. ". . . Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming."
In the end, as we brace ourselves for more horror, we are liberated by the man's ability to find beauty in the simplest of physical things (and McCarthy's rendering of them), and through the deep love the man bears for his son. The pair is the sediment coiling on their hydraulic axis toward the sea. It is they who have been softened in the heat and then reset out of true. But by forcing us to examine this bleakest of possible futures, we can all learn something about what truly matters in life, and where to find beauty in the most unlikely of places on the road.
Summary of The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2008 of the 2006 publication)
NATIONAL BESTSELLERPULITZER PRIZE WINNER
National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year
The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post
The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food?and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play). Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane
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