The Road: Book Review

Warning: may contain spoilers!

If a post-apocalyptic, cruel world banishes rules, then shouldn’t the very written book that describes its story throw further rules into the wind?

This was my first thought when I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and saw that it was written different from any other book I’d seen, in modern or classic literature that I had come across. There are no chapters, no speech marks, often apostrophes are forgotten in contracted words, sentences run on and on, and many sentences in the same paragraph start with the same word. If anything, it isn’t just different from other books I have read, but that very list I just outlined goes against all the writing rules I have also learned. So, again, I say: if the story is set at the end of the world and there are no rules, why should the author stick to rules too?

I’ve since began to read No Country for Old Men by the same author and have discovered he writes that book in a similar way too. So, it wasn’t a stylistic choice solely for the post-apocalyptic world, but in my head, I like to see that as one of the reasons because it helped me connect with the book on another level. And if it wasn’t a reason, and it just so happened to be how Cormac writes, it still had the same effect on me.

Now let’s talk about the story itself. It’s harrowing yet beautiful. Disturbing yet mesmerising. Sad yet hopeful. It’s bleak and unforgiving yet you find yourself turning page after page and not wanting to stop following the man and his son, whose names you never come to know. The story follows them both through barren land, stripped of food, medicine, and anything else they once would have used in a normal, civilised world. Heading toward the coast to avoid the harsh winter and search for anyone, anything that would take their lives from survival to living, they come across harrowing scenes. The world has turned cannibalistic. There are good guys and bad guys; you don’t know who is who, and neither do they. They’re starving, cold, and lost. The father wants to look after his son and provide for him, but the harsh landscape has been ransacked for miles, every building and every town picked clean, so it's hard for him to do so.

Besides a few paragraphs of flashbacks to, what I presume to be, the early days of the apocalypse with his late wife, you learn nothing of his past. It’s briefly hinted that the boy was born at the beginning of the end of the world, and then you learn that the mother couldn’t handle this life anymore and ended her own. But besides not learning about their past and without Cormac going too much into the details of their feelings either, you learn to connect with the father and son and admire their own characters. There is a focus on the characters' actions instead; because I suppose in an apocolypse, you just have to keep going and keep moving, despite any thoughts or feelings you hold. Your actions are more vital for survival.

What is visible is the father’s devoted love for his young boy and his determination to keep him alive and keep him hopeful. Even in the darkest times they share together, he comforts him and puts him first always. My heart ached to read when he would hand his son food first, when they were both starving, then my heart ached even more when the son would insist and make sure his father ate too. Their love and care for each other worked hard to outweigh the death grip the harrowing world had on them. There was a bittersweet beauty to the boy’s character as well; despite growing up in this dangerous life, he had not grown hard or cold. Instead, his kindness and empathy shone through. Constantly, he would worry for his father, or for this other little boy who was a stranger to him, that he saw just for a moment passing by. He made sure his father promised not to kill the one dog (and only living animal) they saw, despite it being their only chance for meat, for any type of food at all. Though humanity had turned vile, they had not let themselves follow that same path.

Their love for one another is about the only thing that keeps them alive and sustains them throughout the novel. The father had told himself at the start that he could do the unfathomable action, that he could kill his son if it got too hard for them. But he discovered that he could not. And he could not do it to himself either. Despite the hunger and the fear, they prevailed through the decaying land. Only for love. Because there certainly wasn’t anything else to live for.

The depictions of burned America are poetic and mesmerising. You follow the two characters on their journey, but you also follow the landscape. There is ash, so much ash. But the descriptions of it create such a strong image. It’s a depressing, cold image, but it’s so vivid. The actual reason for the apocalypse is not revealed, nor is the story of how it happened or how long ago. All you have is the conversations between a father and his son, their voyage, and the road they walk along. You’d think three hundred pages of a long, slow journey would not be thrilling, yet it proves to be with its intimate descriptions that help you connect with the two of them. Just as the world is stripped of everything it once was, the two of them are stripped to the core too, in a way. You see their vulnerability and weaknesses, but their strengths too.  

There is no proper nor accurate concept of time, as calendars were long forgotten and neither character has a watch. This gives them a sense of freedom that is terrifying and raw. They follow only the sun and moon, sleeping when its dark, walking when its light. Heavily focused on action, the story is written in a way that leads you through each movement of the character, yet you don’t learn much about what’s going on in their heads as they carry out their actions. This is relative for the world they are in; they must do to survive, though all they have to occupy themselves is each other and their thoughts. It’s an interesting dynamic. One that helped craft the vivid imagery throughout, as through reading their very actions one sentence at a time, as a reader, you became the man or the son despite it being written in third person. Knowing all their movements made it feel like you knew them.

Ending with the father dying was a miserable thing yet one that I knew had to happen. Cormac’s writing was real and raw, and it had to remain that way. There would be no happy ending for them together; I had a feeling deep in my gut from page one. That hadn’t stopped me hoping though. So, I still felt that sinking sadness when his death was depicted very matter-of-factly, just like everything else in the book. Matter-of-fact yet poetic at the same time; it was a strange combination that Cormac carried out effortlessly in his approach. A tiny slither of hope shone through for the boy though as he met a stranger after his father’s death. I’m not sure whether this was a stroke of luck or not, but I am glad it happened for the boy. So, he would not learn what true loneliness felt like without his father for endless days.

Though since finishing the book, I have come to read alternative theories for the ending. Since this stranger coincidentally came across the boy and introduced him to his family, there are whispers that the family were actually cannibals who were praying on the boy. As there was someone, or multiple people, following the two of them before the father’s death, some say it was this family; and they were not following to be kind, but for their own gain... their own meal. The land had driven people to become cannibals and with Cormac’s depressing, raw writing style and with him being known to give books negative (never happy) endings, this theory unfortunately deems reasonable... and all the more likely. Nevertheless, we’ll never know.

This piece of American literature was bleak but breath-taking. If it were longer than three hundred pages, I would have read on and still been mesmerised by their journey. I would have been happy, albeit eager, to continue reading the melancholy words about this miserable world.

About the Author:

Chloe D'Inverno works in marketing and is the Editor-in-Chief/Founder of Everywhere Publication. A passionate reader and reviewer, she loves nothing more than getting lost in a good book with a chai latte in hand. When she’s not reading or writing reviews, you’ll find her dreaming up creative ideas and sharing stories that inspire.