The Road

by Joe Penhall and Cormac McCarthy

The searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son’s fight to survive.

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.
(back cover)

• ISBN10: 0307277925
• ISBN13: 9780307277923
• Publish Date: 4 September 2007 (first published 1 January 2006)
• Publish Status: Unknown
• Imprint: Vintage Books USA
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 287
• Language: English

Reviews

[thepunktheory]

Full review on my blog: www.thepunktheory.wordpress.com

The only word that adequately describes this novel is haunting. There's not much of an explanation what caused the terrible circumstances the father and son are now facing which makes the story even darker. While reading I had an uneasy feeling that I could never quite shake. The plot is somewhat repetitive with actually works perfectly with the overall theme of depression and no hope. It took me a bit to get used to McCarthy's writing style and to get into the story in general. But then I was hooked. I am still not the biggest fan of this writer's style, but the story is captivating. It's a rather short book, so nothing is lost in case you really don't enjoy the story. 

[adamfortuna]

I'm a sucker for dystopian stories. I had a feeling the movie version wasn't going to be as dark as the book, but this made me appreciate how true to the book it was.

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

The Road was published in 2006, two years before The Hunger Games started a boom in the publication of dystopian/postapocalyptic fiction, yet even taking into consideration that McCarthy wrote the book before the fad, The Road doesn't offer much original to the genre. (In fact, the feel of the book has a lot in common with Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague," which was published in 1912.) It's a dystopian focused heavily on world-building, on the day-to-day experiences of a boy and his father as they wander about the roads, looking at a burnt out world. There isn't much in the way of an overarching plot. We're talking about atmosphere here--and too many dystopians have been written, both before and after The Hunger Games, for atmosphere to be particularly interesting.

So for much of the book I was thinking, "I get it. They're walking around, looking for abandoned canned food no one else has looted, pushing their lives in a shopping cart and trying to avoid other people on the road because you never know who's going to shoot you." And I have read so many books like this. Once in a while, the boy and the father ponder their fate or the fate of humanity. The real problem is: I have read books that have a very similar world-building (Angelfall by Susan Ee comes to mind), but which also have a plot. So The Road didn't impress me.

I know the book has some status as school required reading, so it's hard to dismiss it entirely. There are some things about it that are philosophically interesting, if one is willing to dig about for them. The relationship between the boy and his father is particularly worth a second look for anyone reading this academically. And it asks some questions that are basically dystopian/postapocalyptic staples: What does it mean to be human? What is it ethical to do in the pursuit of survival? Is there really a clear line between the "good guys" and the "bad guys?" But, since these are questions practically inherent to the genre, I'm not sure I can say there's anything specially compelling about the way they're raised in The Road, if it's worth reading this book over other books from the genre.

The Road is solid, but I've seen so much that's similar that I simply can't be excited about it. It just seems so standard, except with a particularly literary fiction type of style (mixing up the chronology, not clearly indicating who's speaking, etc.), and the style simply doesn't compensate for the lack of original thought or content.

[Amber]

Since this is a mini review, you might be able to guess how I felt about The Road. I tend to have no problem reviewing books that I loved, and also books that I was enraged by, but books that were so boring that I wanted to tear my eyes out are so difficult to review.

The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel, and it’s really highly rated. Really, really highly. Whenever there’s a list of post-apocalyptic books you HAVE to read, The Road is pretty much always in the top three. It’s about a father and his son who cross the United States (I can’t remember where they were going, but whatever. USA) that has been torn apart by the apocalypse. While they’re travelling down this Road (capital R for emphasis), they get into a lot of trouble and it’s all pretty dark and bleak.

It’s not that things don’t happen in this novel. Actually, The Road is quite action packed. There are lots of fights and other people and deaths and things, but none of them were enough to grip me. I didn’t have the attention span for it, and I think it was because of McCarthy’s writing style. He’s just not very engaging.

It was all very mundane.

I don't even have words for how awesome this book is. Go read it. It's pretty quick but very powerful.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

When it comes to books, I try to read the book before seeing the movie. There have been many occasions where I saw the movie first; often it does make it harder to enjoy the book (American Psycho and Psycho) but I try not to let that effect my rating. When it came to The Road things were a little different; sure the story is almost exactly like the movie, but we book was far more superior. The writing was splendid, full of darkness and making this wonderfully bleak and even brutal.

The Road is a story of a Father and Son travelling south in order to survive the winter in a post-apocalyptic world of ash. It’s a beautiful tale of survival; no just from the gangs or “Bad Guys” but also from constantly starving or freezing. While I’m not sure what happened to the world, all it says is “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” I suspect it was a nuclear holocaust.

The Road is a wonderful read, but be forward this isn’t a fast paced, action packed Post- apocalyptic book, this is a story of a survival. My only main problem with this book is the fact that the father is never seems to get angry with his son, even if he loses the gun or leaves the gas on, he never seemed to get upset about the situation. I just feel that a normal human would react to a situation like that

[girlinthepages]

It simply cannot be described in any way but this: if one is to read any sort of post-apocalyptic literature, one must read this novel.

[jamiereadthis]

I kept thinking the whole way through how McCarthy wrote this for his son John, and God, what a love letter for the kid to have the rest of his life.

The fifth star for the rhythm of the book, just like a metronome.

[Edited to clarify: I wasn’t being sarcastic or ironic about the love letter. I mean it. Apparently this book gets read as grim or depressing, but I think it’s the most heart-and-guts love letter a kid could get from his father.]

[empressbrooke]

Given its Oprah and Pulitzer status, this is supposed to be a very profound book, but I just wasn't feeling it. Above all else, I think it's because my mind kept wandering to the movie Children of Men, which was also a post-apocalyptic hopeless-situation-with-a-tiny-glimmer-of-hope sort of story that was simply beautiful and left me in awe. Compared to it, The Road is just dismal and repetitious. I was glad it was under 300 pages, since at the halfway point I was already just DONE with the walking-along-the-road-and-hiding-from-people-and-finding-a-house-and-looting-it-for-food-rinse-and-repeat. I get what the repetition was doing, but that doesn't mean that I enjoyed it.

If I hadn't seen Children of Men, might I have enjoyed this more? It's possible, but difficult to determine. There's certainly something to be said for using simplicity to convey a story, but I kept feeling like so much more could have been done with the themes.

[ibeforem]

I didn’t think I was going to like this, but once I got used to McCarthy’s style of prose I was hopelessly hooked. You find yourself wondering if you should feel worse for the man who knows what he’s lost, or the boy who will never know what could have been. You never find out quite what has caused the world to be this way. And the story ends in a way I never expected.