The setting of the Road is your worst nightmare come
alive. Set in a post-apocalyptic future,
humanity has been doomed to extinction, with only a few scattered remnants of
the once proud human race remaining. And
ash. Ash is everywhere. It covers the sky and the world both, leaving
everything gray and dead. In the center
of this lifeless and nihilistic setting is a father and his young son, “each
the other’s world entire” who are trying desperately to survive in this world
where survival seems unlikely. There is
simply nothing left at all. Not a thing.
And yet the Father and Son continue to persist, with the
former doing everything humanly possible and then some to keep both himself and
his son alive. Their interactions are
often such that if you were to read a few conversations between them and
nothing else, you might not think this was a post-apocalyptic novel, but just
the everyday life of father and his young son.
The love these two have for one another is undying, and that is part of what
sustains both them (and the reader) as they trudge through the utterly bleak
and lifeless wasteland that was once the world.
There is nothing exciting or adventurous about this particular
post-apocalyptic world. What precious
few other humans there are, rightly dubbed “The Bad Guys” by the ever-innocent
boy, have resorted to cannibalism, which goes to outright barbaric and
appalling extremes near the end of the novel.
Indeed, this novel is not for the squeamish or overly-sensitive, as the
book shows both the absolute best and worst t
hat humans are capable of in equal measure.
Cormac McCarthy’s writing style in this book is atypical
of what one usually finds in a novel.
There are no quotation marks or commas, which can make knowing when
characters are talking a little hard initially, but you’ll know when characters
are speaking after a while. The writing
style helps to add a feeling of bleakness and emptiness, as here in this
nightmarish vision of the future, even most punctuation marks have been lost.
4 Stars
Daniel
