Review by m_allardyce - The Road

m_allardyce 's review for:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

4.5

dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a post-apocalyptic dystopian odyssey which follows a man and his son on their journey to something, leaving behind the nothing they’ve known so far. The only thing left living are the people – if you can call them that – traversing the titular road, also looking for that nebulous something and finding only violence and suffering along the way. Armed only with a gun and two bullets, the man and the boy have no choice but to keep walking and hoping that what they find will be worth the journey.

This is not a ‘fun’ book. McCarthy doesn’t shy away from the human capacity for violence and pain. At no point does the reader trust that the moments of happiness interspersed throughout the novel are a sign of better things to come. At the turn of every page is a new horror. And yet, despite it all, the characters keep walking and the reader keeps reading with neither really knowing what the end point will be. This, better than anything, signifies how at the centre of all this horror, hope resides.

I really didn’t anticipate enjoying this book as much as I did, though ‘enjoy’ perhaps isn’t the word I mean. I honestly couldn’t put it down. I think the episodic structure helped with this as there was never a moment of pause that the end of a chapter might signify, and I think this nicely reflected the sense in which the characters, too, had no moment of rest.

Anyone who hates Sally Rooney’s aversion to speech punctuation would probably hate this book, as there’s a lack of this as well. I personally really enjoyed this aspect as it created a sense of ambiguity between what is being said vs seen or experienced, which added to the sense of a breakdown of normal social norms or relationships.

I did think the prose style was a little drawn out in places. McCarthy is only too willing to mention every individual cupboard that is opened, and every piece of food eaten. It makes for a very slow story. I appreciate that this is probably an intentional emulation of the experience of the characters, and their feelings of building dread, but it personally made it difficult to digest in places as the carefully crated tension was leading to little payoff.

I also think the ending is a little weak. There’s a line in one of the last paragraphs: “Then he rose and turned and walked back out onto the road”. I feel like this would have been the perfect way to end this story, capturing the core sense that this is the story of an endless journey and that all the characters can do – all anyone can do – is keep going and keep walking the metaphorical road. Two further paragraphs followed this line and in my opinion lessened the impact of the ending.

Overall, this is a story as much about hope as horror, with some gorgeous religious symbolism interspersed to really cement the exploration of the line between what is ‘good’ and what is ‘just’. I’m so glad that I gave it a chance.

Content Warnings