The Road...

As I mentioned in my Opposites Book Tag post, I recently bought this book with a Waterstones book voucher, and put it right near the top of my TBR list. I'd heard good things about it from BookTube, and it wasn't too expensive, so I just thought, 'why not?' (Also I thought the cover was kinda cool!)

The book is...

The Road

Author:

Cormac McCarthy

Genre:

Dystopia/apocalyptic, horror

One-sentence summary:

A man and his son are heading along The Road towards the coast, doing all they can to survive the imminent dangers of a post-apocalyptic world without losing themselves along the way.

Review:

I normally try to steer clear of other reviews of books I've read before I write my own, but I couldn't really avoid it this time...

Six pages of this...

But when I began reading I was so absorbed in the writing that I completely forgot about anything else. It's written in this strange, bleak style with barely any punctuation, and some of the things described at the beginning seem so monstrous and unexplained that I just had to read on. I actually fluctuated between admiring the style - which somehow manages to be both sparse and poetic - and being frustrated by it. I guess the frequent lack of explanation, which sometimes really annoyed me, could be intended to reflect the here-and-now mentality and the forgetfulness of the past (deliberate or no) that are key throughout the book.

The characters remain unnamed, and nothing much is said about them, but I still came to really love them and root for them by the end. The father and son relationship is poignant and powerful, and really resonates as the last small but mighty scrap of humanity.

The story really questions what it means to survive and to hope, what lies at the heart of the human race and what it will do when pushed to the utmost extreme. These questions lurk beneath all the detailed descriptions of the two characters' daily efforts to find food and shelter, and their interactions with each other.

Final thoughts:

This book is so immersive. I read it in two sittings, both on the same day, and both times I put the book down my head lingered for a while in McCarthy's stark and perilous world. I couldn't, and can't, get it out of my head. This book is the very definition of haunting.

So for that reason:

What did you think of The Road? Did you agree with my review? Let me know in the comments.