The Road follows the story of a man and his son in a post
apocalyptic world. They are travelling towards the coast in the hope of finding
others like them. They scavenge what they can and sometimes get lucky and find
a store that hasn’t been looted yet. The world they live in is a dangerous
place with people doing whatever it takes to survive, including killing each
other. Frequently they come across dead bodies in houses and on the road. They
are suspicious of meeting “the bad guys” and so are constantly looking over
their shoulders and finding secluded places in which to sleep. We never learn
the names of the man and the boy because that doesn’t matter in this new,
strange, world.
The book doesn’t have any chapters. It’s just one long
chapter with gaps between the paragraphs. It also doesn’t bother with grammar
most of the time, you have to figure out where the commas go yourself. It added
to the sense of confusion and uncertainty that the characters in the book feel.
They have no idea what they are going to come across from one day to the next,
or even if they’re going to survive. This structure sometimes makes it
difficult to work out who’s talking to who. One character will say something
and then say something else, but the second thing they’ve said is on a new
line. But as there are really only two characters in the story it’s not too
difficult to figure out when that happens.
The characters themselves are interesting. It’s unclear how
long they’ve been living as they have but it’s years, rather than weeks or
months. They’ve become used to it and struggle to remember life before whatever
disaster occurred to cause the apocalypse. The man is struggling to cope by
himself, without his wife to help him with their son. He is worried about his
son, and about something happening to himself that would make him unable to
look after his son. The boy lives in a pretty much constant state of terror. He
has seen things that he is too young to see and is worried what other
horrifying things there are to see. He also likes his dad to be near to him so
he knows where he is. The boy is also lonely and dreams of having a friend to
play with.
McCarthy tells a good tale of survival against the odds. A
good percentage of the population are dead, at least in America, and the
survivors are worse off than those who didn’t make it. Although there is not a
lot of description and absolutely no embellishment, you get the atmosphere of
the place strongly through the man’s thoughts. He is always on the edge of
giving up and letting death take him, but at the same time he can’t bear to
think of his son dead too or alone without him. It’s hard enough being a parent
now, but trying to provide for someone in a world where nothing grows and
rivers have dried up is nearly impossible.
I would say I enjoyed this book but enjoyed seems the wrong
word given the setting. They come across different people in the book who have
coped in different ways. Some are just living in a trance like state and
couldn’t care what happens to them. Others are determined to stay alive, even
that means killing others in order to do so. It makes you wonder which group
you would be in. I would have liked a bit more description but that would have
ruined the flow of the book. It’s all told from the man’s point of view and
that’s enough. I hope this sort of thing doesn’t happen because you can never
be prepared for it.
Overall rating 3 out of 5.
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