Cormac McCarthy is one of the most highly regarded American fiction writers today with such novels as All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men (soon to be a major motion picture starring Tommy Lee Jones) and Child of God. So when his first science fiction novel came out, got terrific reviews and even won the Pulitzer Prize I scooped it up from the library. Sad to say I was neither moved nor terribly impressed.
The Road is the story of a father and son in post-apocalypse America, trying to reach the coast on foot before the full brunt of Winter arrives. This is several years, maybe seven or eight, after the event; the boy was born a few months after the unspecified nastiness killed off most people as well as plants and other animals. Along their hike they rarely encounter other people though to be fair they try hard to avoid contact since most people left have adopted a kill or be killed strategy. There’s little food left, certainly nothing edible growing, just what cans or packages left after years of scrounging.
McCarthy is a literary writer who uses genres for effect rather than inspiration, so the only real science fictional aspect of this book is the setting. Otherwise it could be any other bleak road tale set in some isolated desert or jungle. He bugs me by avoiding normal writing tools such as capitalization, setting off dialog with quote marks and never, even at the end when the boy talks with another man, gives either the father or son names. Nor is the cause of this predicament ever explained, though I can see why McCarthy felt this might be an unnecessary complication and that doing so might distract readers.
Worse, though, the situation the two are in is so relentlessly dire and dark that by the halfway point–which is not much since the book is only 241 pages–I felt inured to the horror and tragedy. The whole time is spent walking, attempting to avoid other people and searching for food and each of these elements is repeated many times. McCarthy would have gotten better marks from me if he’d drastically streamlined the story to a longish short story.
not recommended
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