Two souls in a blighted landscape
The Road Cormac McCarthy Published by Picador ISBN 9780330447546
Imagine a world where everything is dead or dying - a world reduced to just a boy and his father, and a few other lost souls scrabbling for food and survival.
The Road is about two survivors in a post-apocalyptic world in which almost everything as we know it has come to an end. This bleak vision is conveyed in sparse writing and compact dialogue. McCarthy never tells the reader what caused the apocalypse - and, in this context, it is unimportant. This is not a book about the politics of nuclear disarmament, or about any politics. Rather, it is about one of the most elemental relationships - father and child - in an environment in which every day is a fight to survive.
The landscape of this Pulitzer Prize winning novel is grey and hopeless. The man and the boy move through bleak places, recalling green grass and wildlife.
Ash blights the ruins of everything man once made, and the only signs of life are hostile. The only hope is in the relationship between the man and the boy.
The post-apocalypse novel is nothing new, but McCarthy makes the territory his own. The characters say little to each other, but every word is filled with meaning, loss and longing. This is a testing book, not because it is hard to read, but because McCarthy plants seeds of hope only to snatch them away again and again.