The Road
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 @ 04:14
by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
A father and his son wander through a charred, ravaged post-apocalyptic world, where all matter of wildlife is extinct and the rain ashen. Scavenging the scarce food that is left and, with a pistol, fending of the lawless “bad guys” — lawless, plundering bands of cannibals, they continue their journey to reach the coast, despite not knowing what awaits them there.
The book has been (almost universally) highly acclaimed as a formally “challenging”, and perhaps that contributes to my disappointment. (No, it wasn’t “challenging” at all.) The plot is remarkably simple, but even the unravelling of events in their journey feels superficial. While one might argue that McCarthy’s emphasis is not on the intricacy (of, say, moral dilemmas, e.g. survival vs. ethics etc.) of the plot, revelling instead on the intimacy between the father and the son and the poetic quality of its prose — the dialogues composed mostly of short declarative sentences, oft repeated, and of course, without the quotation marks — which I frankly find rather bland. The dystopian image evoked is nowhere as vivid as the one in Jose Saramago’s Blindness, which — also without quotation marks — I find more superior in its development of plot and characters.
Much thanks to booksprice.com for the book.
