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A review by frasersimons
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
As usual, McCarthy’s prose styling is something I gel with so much, that the somewhat trite plot beats never irked me. If anything, the long rumination on each one seemed like a reaction to the post apocalyptic works that came after the first generation. Weirdly, all the first gen ones that I’ve read are as slow and focused on daily life as this one, sometimes to the point of boredom.
I actually didn’t find it as brutal as I’d expected too, oddly enough. But I also already knew this story through cultural osmosis, despite never having seen the film. It’s one of the early ones where everyone wanted to talk about the ending, back in the day, for whatever reason. I actually thought it was the opposite that happened. So joy to misremembering, I guess.
Stephen King maintained that horror shouldn’t be explained, I think. That the unknown is what makes it scary. I liked that about the setting. Every other book of the genre trips over itself trying to tell you exactly the doomsday scenario they’ve thought up. Probably because the underlying anxiety about the thing is the way the narrative maintains tension. This could happen to us right now! Etc etc.. I don’t know if it was my projecting onto the text either, but it felt like the text opened up into excellent prose only when the characters had time and space to do so. Their thoughts and trouble were so circular that it was usually when something broke that pattern that the poetics would emerge. It also ramped up the tension by proxy, since the reader knows they are no longer safe for that very reason. You are not paying attention to the road. You are not being careful. You are busy being human, and doing so is to pay a human cost at every turn.
But there was a lot of hope from those moments too. Without them, could they actually have kept going? Would the close calls have been the final moments, instead? It manages to provoke far more thoughts about the kinds of things these stories typically want a reader to think about by being more quiet and methodical and grim in the absolute desperation of people, and their inherent morality being tried by their animal, craven need.
I actually didn’t find it as brutal as I’d expected too, oddly enough. But I also already knew this story through cultural osmosis, despite never having seen the film. It’s one of the early ones where everyone wanted to talk about the ending, back in the day, for whatever reason. I actually thought it was the opposite that happened. So joy to misremembering, I guess.
Stephen King maintained that horror shouldn’t be explained, I think. That the unknown is what makes it scary. I liked that about the setting. Every other book of the genre trips over itself trying to tell you exactly the doomsday scenario they’ve thought up. Probably because the underlying anxiety about the thing is the way the narrative maintains tension. This could happen to us right now! Etc etc.. I don’t know if it was my projecting onto the text either, but it felt like the text opened up into excellent prose only when the characters had time and space to do so. Their thoughts and trouble were so circular that it was usually when something broke that pattern that the poetics would emerge. It also ramped up the tension by proxy, since the reader knows they are no longer safe for that very reason. You are not paying attention to the road. You are not being careful. You are busy being human, and doing so is to pay a human cost at every turn.
But there was a lot of hope from those moments too. Without them, could they actually have kept going? Would the close calls have been the final moments, instead? It manages to provoke far more thoughts about the kinds of things these stories typically want a reader to think about by being more quiet and methodical and grim in the absolute desperation of people, and their inherent morality being tried by their animal, craven need.