Just Finished Reading: The Road by Cormac McCarthy (FP: 2006)

The world, it seems, is dying if it isn’t already dead. The evidence is all around the man and the boy. No birds fly in the grey leaden skies, no leaves remain on the blackened trees, no fish swim in the rivers or lakes, nothing moves or makes a sound except the wind and the crash of falling trees. It’s cold, very cold, and if they don’t keep moving south they could easily freeze to death out on the road. Days pass without the siting of another human being. No fires burn in the distance, no smoke rises in the day and no footprints mark the pristine grey snowfall. All to the good the man thinks for humans, made desperate with hunger, are dangerous creatures who prey on each other in the absence of any other ‘game’. Sometimes a little luck is enough to separate the barely living from the dead. A can of peaches found here, a blanket found there is sometimes just enough to keep body and soul together. But after more than a decade of scavenging there is little left to find and less left to use. But the drive continues, south to warmer climes and the possibility of finding survivors who have managed to maintain their basic humanity at the end of times – for the sake of the boy.

As bleak stories go this was definitely one of the bleakest of the bunch of end of the world stories I’ve been working my way through (2 more to go!). The reader is dropped right into the middle of things with no real explanation of what happened. From the largely burnt environment and the ever present cold I’m guessing some kind of nuclear exchange. Radiation is never mentioned but even after a decade or so (no dates are given) ash is still falling from the atmosphere and there are images of melted roadways and glass that’s obviously been under extreme temperatures in the past. The narrative revolves around the man and the boy (never named) who appear to be father and son (never really confirmed although the boy does call him ‘papa’) struggling to survive and travel down ‘the road’ to a safer place in the south. They do actually meet several others on the way most of whom appear to be cannibals (much rolling of eyes ensued each time – yes, we get the point, times are hard I said to myself through gritted teeth).

But I can see why it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It’s very well, even at times beautifully, written. The imagery is very arresting and although the book is unrelentingly bleak it never becomes completely depressing. No matter how bad things are the man in particular has hope for the boy (I did think for a while that the boy was a figment of his imagination designed to keep him going but he turned out to be real). But, I did find the whole thing rather dull – despite it being a fast read and not just because of its quite modest 307 well-spaced pages. Not a lot happened, I felt little tension despite being quite ‘involved’ in the text and I found the ending particularly anti-climactic. It sort of just…. Ended. Maybe I missed the point. Maybe there was a lot of allegory that passed me by. There was probably lots of hidden references to great works that went over my head thus diminishing my ‘pleasure’. It’s hard to tell. It certainly wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read by a long margin but I would have expected more of a wow factor from such a critically acclaimed book.