The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Publishers:  Picador

Pages: 307

Main Characters:

The Man, The Boy

Set in a post-apocalyptic world covered in ash, where the human race is all but extinct, a man and his young son travel the Road south in search of a refuge from the cold winter of the north. Their supplies are limited to a shopping trolley full of cans and blankets. The only defence they have against the cannibalistic highwaymen that prowl the Road is a single pistol with three bullets. But what they do have is determination and each other, will it be enough to survive the journey south on the Road?

Firstly, I’d like to say that I have seen the film this book was made into and that I was not that impressed with it.  On the other hand, this book was brilliant! It was filled with such suspense and sadness I ended up reading it in less than two days! The two characters are brilliant. You can really feel for ‘the man’ as he is trying everything to keep his son alive but always seems to have fate against him. He is so brave, always putting ‘the boy’s’ safety before his, whilst risking his life time after time to find food and shelter for his son.  ‘The boy’s’ character is also brilliant. Like his father he is brave, facing things no other little boy could. As he is such a young and naïve child, McCarthy portrays him as the last piece of goodness left in the world. He always looks for the ‘good guys’ in this novel and always wants to help others, even if it risks his father’s and his own life. By the end of the book you feel so much for these two characters and are glad that they both find their own peace at the end.

The only small issue I had with this book was that the narrative was written in a way I’d never really read before. An example of this was ‘said the man’, it was sort of written in the third person but not the typical ‘he/she said’, so at first it was a little hard to get used to. Also, there is a lot of American language and sayings, which for a Brit was quite hard to understand at first. However after a few pages I got used to McCarthy’s style and as I said above, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Brilliant book, if you’ve seen the film you should definitely read this book, it had so much more feeling than the film and the characters were amazing!

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