The Road

What keeps you going after everything else ends? That's what Cormac McCarthy explores in a novel with a narrative as sparse as the meager resources left in the world, which is sure to leave you haunted and wondering what you would do if you were in that situation.

A man and his son, unnamed in the novel, are on a simple pilgrimage to get to a place where they can survive a while longer. To reach this end they brave the perils of the eponymous Road, avoiding others who are more likely to try to eat you than anything else and desperately scrounging for enough food to keep going. In the book, they describe themselves as the "Good Guys", perhaps the last, who are tasked with "Carrying the fire". What, exactly, this fire happens to be is never spelled out, but is clear enough in the boy's civilizing and humanizing influence on the man. There's the unspoken hope throughout that they'll find some place to keep this fire, or join it with a greater conflagration, but hope, like everything else of worth in the world, is in short supply.

The Road is gripping and tense, dark and personal and ashen. Unlike many post-apocalyptic tales that explore how people interact when civilization is shattered this book meditates on what, if anything, can fuel life when there's nothing left to live for. One of the most haunting scenes in the book involve the man and his wife, and her leaden argument against going on is both disgustingly selfish and disturbingly logical.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, though at times I was as exhausted by it as if I were travelling down that road myself. This is not one for the faint of heart. If you feel uncomfortable reading a review without some kind of quantitative summary, I give The Road two Ashen Sickly Travellers out of three.