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The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Fiction; Contemporary Literature
This brilliant, stark apocalyptic tale takes the reader on an emotionally harrowing journey through the bleakest and darkest of landscapes, both of the physical and the mental, but somehow never loses the light of humanity and hope that glimmers deep within those who struggle to remember such virtues.
Cormac McCarthy
Fiction; Contemporary Literature
This brilliant, stark apocalyptic tale takes the reader on an emotionally harrowing journey through the bleakest and darkest of landscapes, both of the physical and the mental, but somehow never loses the light of humanity and hope that glimmers deep within those who struggle to remember such virtues.
The world has, literally, turned to ashes, the land charred, wasted, and dotted with skeleton corpses and the dusty remains of civilization. A man and his young son, whose names we never learn, are pushing their way south, consumed utterly by the struggle to stay alive. They are freezing, starving, and sick. Brief glimpses into the past give us precious few details about what happened to the world and to the other people in their lives, but what little we're told is enough to chill the blood. Although the world's population has been largely decimated, the man and boy are not the only ones left alive. There are a few like them - the half dead, hollow-eyed survivors, but there are also roving bands of beings who were once like us but who have no human left in them now, and know only savagery. The father keeps his weakened, questioning son heartened by the mantra that he and the boy are "the good guys", goodness being the only thing to separate from those who steal and kill to stay alive. The father knows better, of course, that no one is 'good' or 'evil' anymore, but he also knows that this spark of salvation is what keeps the boy alive and hopeful. It is that determination to protect the boy from spiritual devastation that makes this story so powerful, as well as the evocative language, which leaps out from the page when you least expect it, like the man's private thought that 'All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain.'
The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for 2007, and McCarthy is also the author of No Country for Old Men.
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