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Rating:  -
A man and a boy are traveling in a bleak and desolate world. Ashes decorate the scarred and burnt landscape. The man and the boy struggle to survive in an almost empty land while avoiding the straggling groups of marauding invaders bent on evil. The man and the boy travel down THE ROAD in a powerful and unforgettable tale.
Atmosphere is absolutely critical to the success of THE ROAD. Cormac McCarthy envisions a post-apocalyptic world that is both harsh and believable. One can easily visualize the remnants of our current civilization as described in THE ROAD. Everyday items we take for granted become prizes worth killing for while the items we currently consider luxuries are ignored as they are useless when survival is all that matters. The joy over a can of peaches is beautiful and poignant in the hands of this storyteller.
The sometimes terse and simplistic prose only serves to heighten the horror of the world in which the man and the boy travel. Even the lack of names for all the characters, except for one, adds a starkness to this powerful and often depressing tale. However, all is not lost as there is a kernel of hope buried within the tale, the hope of the power of love that knows no boundaries or limits.
On audio, THE ROAD is a frightening and eerie story. Tom Stechschulte's narration is absolutely superb. He provides just the right pleading, sometimes whiny tone for the boy to contrast with the gruff voice of the man.
THE ROAD is not an easy tale to listen to or read. Cormac McCarthy doesn't pull any punches with this one as he demonstrates just what lengths man will go to when survival and love are all that matter. Not everyone will enjoy this tale, but it is destined to be a classic for the strong emotions it evokes.
COURTESY OF CK2S KWIPS AND KRITIQUES
Rating:  -
I've read post-apocalyptic tales before. I've read tales of fathers and sons.
There are key elements missing in this story. Specifically: plot line. Man and boy walk down the road, while wonderful descriptions of a bleak landscape are recited. But other than that, almost nothing happens. Oh, there are a couple of encounters, but none fleshed out to the point where there is a significant action sequence or tension, beyond the steady grinding of death by starvation.
This is nothing that hasn't been done better by any number of authors. Perhaps the rabid fans of this novel have not read any of these types of stories before, but there's nothing that makes this better, or even as good, as many of the others out there.
Rating:  -
...or does McCarthy totally overuse the word "okay" in almost every exchange of dialog between the man and the boy? It actually gets annoying after a while. Nobody says okay that much!!! Aside from that, it is a very good and disturbing novel that portrays exactly the world that humanity will deserve after a nuclear war.
Rating: -
I'm not really big on reading novels. Outside Hemingway, Vonnegut, and a handful of others, I find most of today's fiction full of clever prose, but ultimately spoon-feeding and ponderous. However, I found this book not ponderous, but ponderable. And the pondering comes from me. With every page I found myself filling in the all the blanks. Agonizing over what would I do at this point? What if my child saw that? Would I be that courageous? Or would I cave? This story puts you front and center into a meditation of hopelessness. Unenviable, but cathartic. The Man in the story is the ideal of the best we could ever hope to be. That we would be strong enough to save that which we love so much. Messianic in the most human sense. Trudging imperfectly into a full on hell, armed with nothing but a single bullet and his hope against hope for nothing else but the sake of his child. I know some didn't think much of this story, and I respect their opinion. I only hope the upcoming film does the story justice, so maybe those who couldn't take something true from the pages will find what's meaningful to them in a more visceral environment. I actually had to stop about six pages from the end to gather myself, which I have never done. I was caught completely off guard, that a book could ever bring me to such a place. But when all you have done for nearly 300 pages is carry your own child through the nightmare of nightmares, then getting to that place comes pretty easy.
Rating: -
I don't normally review products or books on Amazon but there are a few here and there that seem to force my hand. I am not sure where 'real' critics or Cormac McCarthy himself would rank this book but to me its right there at the top. In most of McCarthy's books the protaganist has a singular thing that seems to drive them, "the fire inside". And for those that understand "it" it is an amazing thing to behold. For the father of this story "the good guys carry the fire", this thing that he finds and nourishes within his own son, at every step afraid of its extinction, and even at the end succeeds at keeping it alive in a landscape where it shouldn't even exist.
A book that somehow captures what every parent feels for their children and no where is it more poignant than in a situation where the stark realities have driven it to be abandoned by almost everyone else.
Truthfully, an astonishing read.
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