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Showing reviews 6-10 of 1566
 "Are We Still The Good Guys?" October 14, 2006
prisrob (New EnglandUSA)
29 out of 39 found this review helpful
'Concurrent with keeping his son alive is the more metaphysical challenge of sustaining his son's innate goodness while forcing him to witness the corruption of all moral behavior. "Are we still the good guys?" the boy asks in moments of confusion and shock. His father insists they are. "This is what good guys do," he tells him. "They keep trying. They don't give up." Why, then, his son asks, won't he help the stragglers they run across instead of running from them or shooting at them? "We should go to him, Papa. We could get him and take him with us. . . . I'd give that little boy half of my food." How to explain the necessity of abandoning others to certain death (or worse, in one particularly terrifying scene) while maintaining that they're "the good guys," the ones "carrying the fire"? Washington Post
Cormac Mccarthy has given us a glimpse of a world none of us want to see or visit, but we are there. It is desolate, singulatory, stark, bleak; all of these words and more are needed to describe a world after a nuclear explosion. We are left to imagine the events, the place, and the time. All we have are these two souls, dad and son, no names. They are moving from one place to another to get to the coast, why, we do not know, are left to wonder. Along the way Mccarthy describes the world we never want to see. Smoldering even after a few years, everything black and stripped of any semblance. Not many people, and those they meet, they are afraid of. Looters, and murderers and eaters of flesh. These two souls, father and son, the two evidences that love can keep you going, can keep you on the right path, and can keep you "One of the good guys". There is not much to keep you going or to keep you safe. Death, no food, no shelter, no clothing, harsh and cold environment, only your wits, and then it is hard to keep them together. A harsh and cold path and if it is what we have to face, Cormac Mccarthy has given us the most beautiful prose and surreal writing.
This is a book to be read by everyone. This is a book to be remembered, to be revered and to be kept in the recesses of our brains, to come out only when necessary. This book begs to be discussed. So many nuances, so many allegories, and so many scenes that are reminiscent, but still new.
"He knew only that the child was his warrant," it says of the father and his mission. "He said: if he is not the word of God, God never spoke." The love of a father and his son, the greatest love of all.
Highly, highly recommended. prisrob 10-14-06
Love among the ashes January 29, 2008
C. MCCALLISTER (The waters of the Great Lakes)
15 out of 21 found this review helpful
This is a different kind of tale, as there is almost no story, as defined by a linear series of significant events, leading to a conclusion. What story there is: a man and his son travel across a post-Apocalyptic America, probably southern California, trying to reach the coast, where they hope things will be better. The land is desolate, with most people killed by some kind of cataclysm that never does get clearly defined, as the characters do not know what happened. Almost all vegetation is burned, few animals are left alive, the land and the air is soot-laden, and the sun and moon and blue sky are rarely seen, if ever.
The circumstances described suggest a massive meteor strike. A distant nuclear war is another possibility, although no radiation sickness is described, and the cataclysm was several years before the story began. Also, when the man briefly describes the event, he mentions bright flashes followed by a sonic boom. If the flashes had been nuclear detonations, near enough to be seen and heard, radiation sickness would have followed. Unlike most post-Apocalyptic stories, where the causal event(s) are described in detail, the event(s) are left undefined, and are just taken as a given.
This novel is mainly an in-depth character story, although we never know the names of either the man or the boy. We learn how they survive, on a day-to-day basis, as they travel down The Road, which also never gets named. One way to view this story is as an existential fable, that asked the questions: When everything is taken away from someone, what is left? How does the person carry on? Why does the person carry on? How does one know if one is a "good guy" or a "bad guy" when everyone is just trying to survive? In the end, we know these two people, to the core, in a way that makes most characters in most books seem flat and undeveloped, by comparison.
From my description, this might sound like a boring book to read. It is not. Cormac McCarthy has taken this bare-bones tale, set in a world where almost everything is gone, and masterfully created a truly riveting story. Except for some points, mentioned below, the prose is starkly beautiful, with a wonderful mixture of semi-rambling descriptive sequences and simplistic, Hemingway-esque dialogue. It is a sad, almost depressing story, that still glorifies and quietly praises and brilliantly displays humanity's ability to love and to persist at living, in the face of indisputably insurmountable odds and circumstances. It is an ode to love and determination. The father and his son become each other's world, and each other's reason for living in the world.
At first, I found Cormac McCarthy's writing style somewhat irritating, and I think many English teachers might cringe, when reading this. McCarthy seldom uses apostrophes in contractions; "can't" becomes "cant". When he does use apostrophes, I sometimes had to re-read the passage, as the usage was not in a way to which I was accustomed. For example, when "they had" was contracted to "they'd", it was to indicate "they were in possession of" instead of the pluperfect or past perfect tense of a verb, as in "they had walked all day". There are almost no commas in the novel, nor are there quotation marks around any of the dialogue. And, many sentences are incomplete. Everything must be determined from context.
How does Cormac McCarthy break all these rules of standard English, and still write beautifully? I believe that a sample is the best, answer.
"The road crossed a dried slough where pipes of ice stood out of the frozen mud like formations in a cave. The remains of an old fire by the side of the road. Beyond that a long concrete causeway. A dead swamp. Dead trees standing out of the gray water trailing gay and relic hag moss. The silky spills of ash against the curbing. He stood leaning on the gritty concrete rail. Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counter spectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence."
As this sample suggests, McCarthy possesses a broad vocabulary and no reluctance to use it. However, I never saw it as pretentious, as it sometimes seemed in Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant). Donaldson wielded an impressive vocabulary, but it often seemed strained and forced, or like an esoteric club, used to impress and baffle the reader. For McCarthy, the word usage came off as a sign of an author, in love with words, displaying that love exuberantly.
Reading The Road will likely affect how I will write from now on. I know that it changed how I think of life and love and persistence and materialism.
A Sharp Etching November 6, 2006
Patrick Shepherd (San Jose, CA USA)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
Here is a book with very little action, an abbreviated set of characters who aren't even named, and a world so bleak it really can be described in unremitting shades of gray, yet nevertheless manages to not only hold your interest, but find a way to grab your emotions.
The post-apocalyptic world of this book is one of darkness and ash, so dark that the plants can't grow anymore, ash so thick it not only covers everything in a blanket but hides the sun and moon. In this world we follow two travelers, a father and son, in search of a better place while avoiding the `bad guys', those who have been reduced to cannibalism to survive. Now all this has been done many times before, in books both good and bad, but what differentiates this from prior works is the absolute leanness of this book. Nothing is introduced that is peripheral to the pair's journey and their relationship, the prose remains both simple and sparse, the current world situation taken as a given, without need for long explanations. The daily happenings quickly find a rhythm of repetition, with just enough variation to avoid boredom while strongly enhancing the general depressive tone. However, the very vagueness of how this situation came about, or how scientifically plausible such a situation may be, may bother some readers, even though one of McCarthy's points is that it doesn't matter how or why the world got this way, what matters is what you do now to cope with it.
In some ways, this book is allegorical in nature, and there are some allusions to both the Bible and other works of classical literature. If you so happen to miss these allusions, though, I don't think it will harm either your enjoyment or understanding of this book, as, as simple as it is, McCarthy has not forgotten to tell a story, first and foremost.
There is a ray of sunshine here, but its brightness is more because of contrast with all the other bleakness. When you reach its illumination, it will say something to you about what it means to be human, as opposed to just being animal. But because this book is so unrelentingly one-noted, it doesn't quite reach the level of greatness attained by things like Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition)and other books that have delved deeply into the depths of despair and hopelessness - but it's still a worthwhile and rewarding read.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
Brilliant, dark but hopeful view of humanity December 26, 2006
R. C. Kopf (Seattle, WA United States)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Road tells the simple story of a man and his son (they are not named in the book) struggling to survive and find meaning in a post-Apocalytpic world. The novel carries many of McCarthy's signature touches -- brilliant language, violence, a grim view of human nature and an Old Testament flavor. But this book is more endearing and hopeful than other McCarthy works, with its focus on the tender love between the man and his son, as well as its enduring belief in the goodness of humankind, even in the worst circumstances.
Not an English Cozy! Existential Despair Ahead! April 26, 2008
Douglas S. Wood (Monona, WI)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
No Cormac McCarthy work should be approached carelessly. This is Serious Business - real literature not intended for the meek, those with weak stomachs, or the suicidal (I'm not sure I'm entirely joking). And keep a good thesaurus handy. As always, McCarthy takes the English language out for some vigorous exercise. McCarthy has not used all 475,000 words (according to Webster) in the English tongue, but then he's not done writing yet, either.
'The Road' involves a father and son walking across a post-apocalyptic America. Everything is pretty much dead except for scattered humans and some mushrooms. The book never relates what the Event was, but McCarthy apparently has done so in interviews. Take my word for it, whatever it was, it was Bad, Real Bad. The book takes place about 10 years after the Event. The boy, having been born on the day of, knows nothing of life Before (I don't usually write with Capital letters, but The Road seems to demand it). Father and son walk the road and survive by scavenging and avoiding the few people they come across.
They head relentlessly south under gunmetal grey skies in the cold and snow or under slate grey skies in the cold and rain. And I did I mention hunger? Or rather make that Hunger. Its repetitiveness opens The Road to easy parody, but is also necessary to create the almost complete sense of despair and hopelessness. And yet McCarthy weaves a counter thread: the warm, loving, and mutually protective relationship between the father and boy and their self image as being the 'good guys' who 'carry the fire'. Their world views, if such a term makes sense in this ash-covered dead zone, can differ - the boy is more willing to risk contact with strangers, the father more cognizant of the catamites and the cannibals.
When I suggested that perhaps McCarthy could have lopped off a hundred pages or so and still have had an equally fine piece of existential despair, a friend observed that McCarthy likes to pummel his readers. Having previously read Blood Meridian (Picador Books), McCarthy's tale of vicious brutality on the Tex-Mex border in the 1830s, I have to agree. The writing is exquisite, but reading McCarthy requires a bit of the masochist. An English cozy it is not. Approach The Road with caution. Highly recommended.
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