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A review by bhnmt61
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
5.0
I've been meaning to read this novel for years, but had been put off by other readers' comments that it was unrelentingly joyless and despairing. But I've read a few too many light romances recently, to the point where I was starting to not enjoy them, so I decided now was the time to tackle a dark classic.
The readers are right that there is no hope of hope in this gritty post-apocalyptic story of a father and son searching for a place to call home. The nature of the disaster is unspecified, and that's at least part of why it can work-- is there any disaster, even a nuclear one, that would cause the destruction of all plant and animal life, and yet leave humans alive? There is no food to eat at all, outside of finding caches of pre-apocalypse food in half-rotting houses, or cannibalism. The man and the boy (they are never named) travel several hundred miles south in the course of the novel, and there is nothing anywhere other than desolation and coldness and ash.
But there are also plenty of good reasons to read The Road. The relationship between the father and son is tender and sweet and beautifully rendered, but not cloyingly so--they often argue and disagree. McCarthy may be describing a bleak, dead world, but the language he uses is beautiful, even occasionally brilliant. You can't help but keep turning the pages, because you want to know what is going to happen to these two characters.
And there are also many things to think about--it would be a great book club book. For one, the two frequently speak of themselves as "the good guys," and they are looking for the other good guys, but when they (rarely) come across someone new, the man is too damaged and cynical to trust. At what point does cynicism become self-reinforcing?
But ultimately, I'm not sure if this novel will hold up over the long-term. If we survive our current mess, a hundred years from now I can imagine a university course on "post-apocalyptic fiction 1970-2030," that would include The Broken Earth, The Stand, Station Eleven, The Hunger Games and lord knows what else, and will this novel be there?
Well, yes. Almost certainly. But it is not without faults. There is a tacked-on scene at the end that feels false. And by the end, the boy has become irritating in his unrelenting purity of heart--did McCarthy take that too far? And especially there is what the NYMag.com review of the film called McCarthy's obsession with "the end of the Age of Good Men (which never existed, but don't tell him that)." When I read that, I thought, yes! that's it exactly. In that context, the novel could easily be called The Last Good Man, and you could hand it to your class and let them have at it.
So: definitely worth reading, but don't tackle it if you're already in a depressed or despairing mood.
(I originally gave this four stars but after further thought, I'm bumping it up to five stars. Compared to other things I've rated four stars recently, it's definitely a step up, even if I'm not quite as impressed with it as some others have been.)
The readers are right that there is no hope of hope in this gritty post-apocalyptic story of a father and son searching for a place to call home. The nature of the disaster is unspecified, and that's at least part of why it can work-- is there any disaster, even a nuclear one, that would cause the destruction of all plant and animal life, and yet leave humans alive? There is no food to eat at all, outside of finding caches of pre-apocalypse food in half-rotting houses, or cannibalism. The man and the boy (they are never named) travel several hundred miles south in the course of the novel, and there is nothing anywhere other than desolation and coldness and ash.
But there are also plenty of good reasons to read The Road. The relationship between the father and son is tender and sweet and beautifully rendered, but not cloyingly so--they often argue and disagree. McCarthy may be describing a bleak, dead world, but the language he uses is beautiful, even occasionally brilliant. You can't help but keep turning the pages, because you want to know what is going to happen to these two characters.
And there are also many things to think about--it would be a great book club book. For one, the two frequently speak of themselves as "the good guys," and they are looking for the other good guys, but when they (rarely) come across someone new, the man is too damaged and cynical to trust. At what point does cynicism become self-reinforcing?
But ultimately, I'm not sure if this novel will hold up over the long-term. If we survive our current mess, a hundred years from now I can imagine a university course on "post-apocalyptic fiction 1970-2030," that would include The Broken Earth, The Stand, Station Eleven, The Hunger Games and lord knows what else, and will this novel be there?
Well, yes. Almost certainly. But it is not without faults. There is a tacked-on scene at the end that feels false. And by the end, the boy has become irritating in his unrelenting purity of heart--did McCarthy take that too far? And especially there is what the NYMag.com review of the film called McCarthy's obsession with "the end of the Age of Good Men (which never existed, but don't tell him that)." When I read that, I thought, yes! that's it exactly. In that context, the novel could easily be called The Last Good Man, and you could hand it to your class and let them have at it.
So: definitely worth reading, but don't tackle it if you're already in a depressed or despairing mood.
(I originally gave this four stars but after further thought, I'm bumping it up to five stars. Compared to other things I've rated four stars recently, it's definitely a step up, even if I'm not quite as impressed with it as some others have been.)