Posted date: 2010-01-30
Posted By :
Marc
The Road is very different from most post-apocalyptic tales. On the surface, it is more realistic in that humans would be generally few and far between several years after a civilization-ending catastrophe. That is an unusual approach, but the undefined event has caused a nuclear winter-type of climate which may or may not be the reason that all or nearly all flora have died. Aside from the background, this is basically a tale of a man trying to get his small son to safety. In a time of absolute uncertainty, however, this is a journey with no known destination. Rather, the drive is to the direction of south. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. This is a representative selection, as it begins and ends with the boy while painting a picture of death. The reader will find that this book reads as if much longer. I mean that in a good way. McCarthy is quite spare with his words, and writes little that does not contribute to the story.
The author's limited use of punctuation gives the book a strange almost first-person narrative feel. The trip takes place over the course of months, in a bleak and desolate landscape of decay. Human contact is rare and interactions are played out in the manner of starving scavengers. A simple and terse narrative paints the dark and depressing picture of humanity reduced to the point of extinction. The characters are brought to life only as character studies in the desire for hope in its near absence. McCarthy makes his dismal world seem all the more real in the absence of ridiculous Mad Max- or Waterworld-style gangs of cartoonish villains.
The man-to-child discourse and the ashen gray realism effect real pity in the reader. Even episodes of providence do little to clear away the stain of depression. This has the paradoxical quality of being a great work of fiction that I would be loath to recommend to casual readers.
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