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Edition:	Vintage International (Mass Market Paperback)
Author:	Cormac McCarthy
Published:	November 2008
Pages:	304
ISBN 10:	0307472124
New:	$3.69 (12)
Used:	$0.01 (405)
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The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale describing a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted years before by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and, apparently, most life on earth. The novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

McCarthy said the inspiration for The Road came during a 2003 visit to El Paso, Texas, with his young son. Imagining what the city might look like in the future, he pictured "fires on the hill" and thought about his son. He took some initial notes but did not return to the idea until a few years later, while in Ireland. Then, the novel came to him quickly, and he dedicated it to his son, John Francis McCarthy.

Plot summary

The Road follows a man and a boy (approximately 10 years old), father and son, journeying together for many months across a desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape, some years--the period of time almost the same as the age of the boy--after a great, unexplained cataclysm which McCarthy told interviewers was his reaction to an imagined comet strike on Earth. The story takes place in the lower Appalachian mountains. Civilization has been destroyed, and most species have become extinct. There is no sunshine, only deep, dark clouds, and the climate has been altered radically due to the comet striking Earth and kicking up a huge dustcloud worldwide. Plants do not grow. What happened outside of the North American landmass is left unexplained, although the fact that no foreign forces have arrived to help the survivors rebuild implies a similar situation worldwide. Humanity consists largely of bands of cannibals, their food-source captives, and refugee-travelers who scavenge for food. While this scenario is not about climate change or global warming, some readers will be forgiven if they read the book this way.

Ash covers everything; it is in the atmosphere, it obscures the sun and moon, and the two travelers breathe through improvised masks. Plants and animals are apparently all dead (dead wood for fires is plentiful), and the rivers and oceans are seemingly empty of life. The only non-human organisms the father and boy encounter are a dog, some edible mushrooms, moss, and some mold and shriveled apples found in an orchard.

The boy's mother, pregnant with him at the time of the cataclysm, was overwhelmed by the desperate and apparently hopeless situation and has committed suicide some time before the story begins. Her rationalization, offered by her as a pragmatic view was that they all would be raped, killed and eaten, and that there was no hope left for a different fate. The father is literate, skilled with firearms, well-traveled, and knowledgeable about machinery, woodcraft, and human biology. He is alert, attentive and aware, and applies all he knows to anticipating and overcoming the challenges he knows are ever-present. He realizes that he and his young son cannot survive another winter in their present location, so the two set out across what was once the Southeastern United States, largely following the highways. They aim to reach warmer southern climates and the sea in particular. Along the way, threats to the duo's survival create an atmosphere of sustained terror and tension.

The father coughs blood every morning and knows he is dying. He struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation, as well as from what he sees as the boy's innocently well-meaning but dangerous desire to help the other wanderers they meet. They carry a pistol with two bullets, meant for suicide should it become necessary; the father has told the son to kill himself rather than be captured. The father struggles in times of extreme danger with the fear that he will have to kill his son to prevent him from suffering a more horrific fate, examples of which include: chained catamites held captive by a marauding band; the discovery of captives locked in a basement, their limbs gradually harvested by their captors for meat; and a decapitated human infant being roasted on a spit.

In the face of all of these obstacles, the man and the boy have only each other (the narrator says that they are "each the other's world entire"). The man maintains the pretense, and the boy holds on to the real faith, that there is a core of ethics left somewhere in humanity. They repeatedly assure one another that they are among "the good guys," who are "carrying the fire." This raises the question of whether maintaining such seemingly pointless nobility in such a situation, while admirable, is ultimately suicidal, at its core a failure to adapt to a changed environment.

In the end, having brought the boy south after extreme hardship but without finding the salvation he had hoped for, the father succumbs to his illness and dies, leaving the boy alone on the road. Three days later, however, the grieving boy encounters a man who has been tracking the father and son. This man, who has a wife and two children of his own, invites the boy to join his family. The passing mention of one child being a daughter implies that an eventual adolescent pairing for the boy is possible, the first and only ray of hope given in the storyline regarding the future of humanity. The narrative's close also suggests that the wife is a God-fearing and compassionate woman, who treats the boy well, a resolution that vindicates the dead father's determination to stay alive and keep moving as long as possible.

Note: there is a clock that has stopped ticking in the story, and the time on the clock when it stopped is the same time as in an earlier McCarthy novel -- 1:17. And the figures are from the Bible passage in Micah 1:17.

Style

Throughout the story McCarthy uses a basic, rough style of writing, which some critics have called Biblical in its cadences and rhythms. He often neglects to use comma's, apostrophe's and "quotation marks". The story also lacks typical dialogue styles. Conversations lack quotations and the dialogue is often not separated into separate paragraphs. In addition, the novel has no chapters or breaks, and the main characters are referred to merely as "the man" and "the boy".

Reception

The Road has received numerous positive reviews and honors since its September 26, 2006 release. The review aggregator Metacritic reported the book had an average score of 90 out of 100, based on 31 reviews. Critics have deemed it "heartbreaking," "haunting," and "emotionally shattering." The Village Voice referred to it as "McCarthy's purest fable yet." In a New York Review of Books article, author Michael Chabon heralded the novel. Discussing the novel's relation to established genres, Chabon insists The Road is not science fiction: although "the adventure story in both its modern and epic forms ... structures the narrative," Chabon says, "ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road is best understood." Entertainment Weekly in June 2008 named The Road the best book, fiction or non-fiction, of the past twenty-five years, ahead of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Awards and nominations

On April 16, 2007, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It also won the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

On March 28, 2007, the selection of The Road as the next novel in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club was announced. A televised interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show was conducted on June 5, 2007 and it was McCarthy's first, though he had been interviewed in print before. The announcement of McCarthy's television appearance surprised those who follow him. "Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor," said John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, when told of the interview.

British environmental campaigner George Monbiot was so impressed by The Road that he declared McCarthy to be one of the "50 people who could save the planet" in an article published in January 2008. Monbiot wrote, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem." This nomination echoes the review Monbiot had written some months earlier for the Guardian in which he wrote, "A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world."

References

Wikipedia