Oct 25 2007

The Road

Published by Fence at 1:38 pm under Books

Author: Cormac McCarthy
ISBN: 9780330447546 DDC: 813.54
Read for the RIP Challenge
See also: LibaryThing ; Darryl’s Library ; Skewed Perspectives ; Cynical Opimitsm ; Bookwomon

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.

Image of The Road This is a novel set at some unidentified point in the future when the world has pretty much come to an end. Something, we don’t know what, has brought society down. There is little food and little shelter left, and for our two main protagonists there is always the danger that they might meet someone on the road, someone who might kill them in order to take what little they have, or maybe someone who might kill them in order to eat them. They travel on, this unnamed man and unnamed boy, constantly on the road, moving trying to find something.

In many ways I suppose this is a fairly typical “end of humanity” type book. We are never really told what cause the end of life as we know it, but whatever it was, it was enough to kill off pretty much all of nature too. Even the trees are dead. And it happened long enough ago that the boy remembers nothing of a “normal” life. The man, his father, tells him stories of what it was like before, and offers some hope as to what they might find, one day, but they both know that there isn’t really any hope. All the man has to look forward to is ensuring that his child doesn’t die a horrible death.

As with most of McCarthy’s books the is very little by the way of punctuation. Full stops only, with the odd question mark. Don’t be expecting quotation marks either, so you’ll have to read it carefully to make sure you know who is saying what. So if that sort of thing bothers you then prepare to be annoyed. I’m not sure myself whether it is an unnecessary gimmick, I can see the point of some of it, after all we don’t talk using the rules of grammar and punctuation.

To be honest I was expecting a little more. I love Blood Meridian; this is nowhere near as good. It is still worth reading, it just didn’t grab me as much as that other one did.

Tags: 7 Stars, 813.54, apocolyptic future, Cormac McCarthy, dystopian future, end of the world, future, humanity, Pulitzer Prize Winner, RIP Challenge, sff, The Road

Related posts


Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Sphere: Related Content

3 Responses to “The Road”

  1. On 25 Oct 2007 at 8:59 pm The girl who's afraid of foxes said

    Yay. I’ve actually read one of the books you’ve mentioned for once! I thought it was good, but certainly not spectacular in the way people seem to rave about it. A kinda 7, maybe 7.5 out of 10 book.

  2. On 26 Oct 2007 at 9:50 am Fence said

    Yup, good but I’m not sure it deserved the Pulitzer. But sure its no harm that a genre book wins :)

    I gave it 7 stars, so we must be on the same page

  3. On 30 Oct 2007 at 5:35 pm Jim/The Velvet Blog said

    I refuse to read any novel in which dialogue isn’t in quotation marks. It just seems like a big, pretentious F.U. to the reader.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply

Posting a spoiler?
Try using the spoiler tag: < spoiler >the spoiler< /spoiler > (leave out the spaces in the code)