The Road

The Road is not a book for the faint of heart as it is, at times, a pretty harrowing read, depicting as it does an apocalyptic world, ruined and broken and two lonely figures' day-to-day survival.

However, it is a compelling read. I could not put it down and the way that it has been written by Cormac McCarthy means that it is not dense - short paragraphs with wide spacing - but in terms of content, it is, I think, quite demanding.

The narrative follows a father and his son who remain unnamed, as they travel across a country which is burning. Ash falls from the sky and nothing grows. There are the vestiges of the former inhabitants in the form of smouldering dwellings and ransacked houses and they encounter other humans occasionally but this world is a desolate place and one in which there is a struggle to survive.

The father and son are heading south and that is all that we know. They have each other and nothing else. We follow the viewpoint of the father as he looks for sustenance in buildings and propels them forward, always with an eye on prospective danger and a wariness for anyone they come across. The journey is their motivator, a reason to keep moving and ultimately, keep living.

In many ways, Cormac McCarthy's narrative is simple. He has no apostrophes for contractions like "don't" and no speech marks. Sometimes, it reads like a play with the dialogue between the two characters merely being placed on new lines. This may be typical of his authorial style as I have not read other books by him but here, it just serves to emulate the starkness of the environment in which his characters find themselves - lacking order, lacking ornamentation, sparing on demonstrative emotion.

McCarthy is literary but he is not wordy. Some of his phrases are lyrical but what I get from his writing is an ability to create a story which is vivid, moving, gripping and horrific without using a surplus of words. What I mean by this is that he tells you what the characters are seeing but there is no overstatement of detail - it is shown to you and you are left reeling from the image.

I would thoroughly recommend this book. It is brutal in what it presents and is very thought provoking.