The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I finished this book last weekend, but I've been waiting to post this review until I had a bit more time to chew on it. Cormac McCarthy is an American Novelist and playwright who's become pretty well known after writing Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and No Country for Old Men. The Road is his latest work, a post-apocalyptic tale of a man and his son traveling through an ashen, burnt-out world, trying to survive. It's very powerful, strikingly written, and at the end, I really felt like I had missed something major.

My experiences reading this wonderful novel are a prime example of 'the right time, the right place'. Immediately before reading The Road, I had been emotionally drained by another story, which was also pretty grim (tho' it had a cathartic ending. I'll wait to review that until later). I already had quite a few books on my 'to-read' shelf, however, and had promised myself to read The Road next, so even though I didn't want to start another dark story so soon afterward, I made myself do it.

(Every The Road movie poster I try to post here gets taken down. If you google it, you'll see it.)

So when I say that I wasn't as impressed by The Road as everyone else apparently was, it had nothing to do with the subject matter or writing style, and everything to do with the fact that I was expecting something more powerful that what I had just gone through, and didn't get it.

Not that the story isn't powerful. If I'd had more empathy to spare, I might have cried at one or two points. The story is very gripping, and convincing too.

The writing style, for that matter, was what I loved most about The Road. It was bleak and minimalistic. He had descriptions, but it was all very matter-of-factly. The characters weren't named, and their dialogue (which took up a good portion of the book) was realistically simple, curt, and completely without standard punctuation like quotation marks. I'm positive that some readers, probably more used to standard character writing, were put off by the writing style, but I felt it was pretty liberating - artistic, without detracting from the story.

A scene from the movie, as the father and son walk down the road with all their supplies.

I felt, as I was reading, that it must end up being an allegory. I'm pretty fond of allegories and extended metaphors and the like, and considering his subject matter and already visibly artistic take on the text, I figured there must be some overriding message or theme, like an Orwell novel or pretty much every other dystopian piece of fiction ever. I'm still not quite sure, after a few days of chewing, what that message was, or if there was in fact a message. I can imagine it as an allegory of the human condition (or a retelling of what most humans have to go through, in a metaphoric sense), but even that explanation seems kind of weak.

It was a good book so if you like to read, I would suggest trying this one out. I don't want to give the impression that I didn't like it - I did. I'm just not quite sure if it's me, as an unqualified reader, who didn't 'get' what I was supposed to, or if the book itself it just really good at passing itself off as a piece of great fiction while simultaneously not actually saying anything important. [WARNING! Ending Spoilers below!]

The Boy from the movie.

 The ending itself is what kind of disappointed me. In case you don't remember (or if you're just reading the spoilers because you don't care), the father dies, as has been hinted along the way, and refuses to kill the boy even though living will probably mean subjecting him to eternal hunger and starving cannibals. A few days later, the boy is found by a small band of 'good guys', who have been following the pair for a while, and take the boy in their care for the now hopeful future.

At least, it's supposed to trick us into thinking it's hopeful. It didn't feel very hopeful to me - it would have been just as good to end, father still alive, the both of them in the same situation they were at the beginning. Besides the man dying, nothing actually changed in the story, except that now the boy is aware that his life depends on them living in the gray line between good and evil (kind of literally, too, since the entire world is burnt an ashen gray).

I figure, if anything, that's the author's message; that life is gray, there are no absolute 'good' and 'bad' people or actions, and that we're all just trying our best with the arbitrary morals we've assigned ourselves. Which doesn't make this ending very hopeful at all. It's still bleak, with the promise of starving to death, if the cannibals don't find them first. The 'life or death' motif (how no one was quite sure if staying alive or killing themselves was the better option) just works to further this idea.

I don't disagree that the novel is very good, and this being the message, pretty powerful. However, I'm not sure it deserves a Pulitzer Prize for, basically, reminding us that life sucks (I refer you again to my previously posted picture).