The Road

#4
Title: The Road 
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2006
Genre:  Fiction/Speculative Fiction
241 pages

+ A bleak and probably realistic evocation of life after apocalypse

- Why no apostrophes? I could make the case that the author stripped everything out of the text to match to narrative, but I find it intrusive

A bleak, generally monochromatic view of the post-apocalyptic period, centered on a father and son. As compared to similar works about life after the Bad Event, this novel is more of an allegory than anything else. Where a book like Stirling’s Dies the Fire is busy with plot, character, and change, The Road is concerned with a world that is essentially static. The unnamed father and son toil through a landscape of grey ash. The plot is subtle and largely psychological (or, perhaps, moral).

The reviews on Amazon are relentlessly positive. I hate to nitpick, but I had a couple of concerns that intruded on my suspension of disbelief. First, I don’t believe that all animals and plants could be destroyed or killed by some sort of conflagration, yet enough humans could survive that we encounter individuals and bands on the road, and learn that there are also communes. Granted that there is cannibalism and a certain supply of canned goods, I still can’t believe that this many people survived but not a bird, dog, fish, or potato did. This repeatedly pulled me away from the story. Second, and slightly spoiler-y, I was disappointed with the conclusion. The son and father’s moral development was interesting and I enjoyed trying to understand the sources of some of the discomfort I felt as the novel progressed. For reasons related to the moral issues raised, the end of the novel felt incongruous rather than a compelling next step. In addition, while the ending seemed to resolve the parable, it did not resolve the plot, instead merely deferring the relatively meager plot’s non-moral dilemmas. Perhaps I should be content with the parable, but a novelist of McCarthy’s caliber ought to be able to resolve the narrative on all levels.

Addendum (1/10/07): I'm told that McCarthy generally eschews punctuation, so it's not unique to this novel.