Bookish Sundays: The Road

Title: The Road

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Category: Fiction, Post-apocolyptic

Synopsis [c/o Barnes & Noble]: "A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation."

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Overview: There isn't much to be said that isn't already covered in the synopsis.  It's an amazing novel of perseverance, survival, and greatest of all, the love that motivates two people to accomplish the impossible.  It never fails to move me to tears; the absolute bond that tethers father to son is unbreakable even in the worst of times, and is so heartbreakingly sweet to watch as they care for one another.

Possibly not up most people's alley.  If you've seen the movie, you'll know that it is a very depressing story, and does not have a particularly happy ending.  However, if you are fond of post-apocolyptic scenarios [thing The Book of Eli movie], of enduring hope and dreams, of constant threatening danger, then this is definitely the novel for you.  It is amazing, sweet, sad, and horrible, all rolled into one.  

Only issue I had with the novel is lack of explanation; there is some cataclysm that destroys the US as we know it, but the reader is never informed on what exactly happened.  Having that information would neither add to or take away from the story, so I know it is simply my own dying curiosity that ruins the plot for me.  Also, don't be confused if you start reading and notice that McCormac doesn't give names for the two main characters; no one in the novel is named, which to me gives it a more "end of the world" flavor since names are no longer necessary as there are not enough people around to call them anything.