This is probably the best book I’ve read this century. If anyone is still hunting for a definitive Great American Novel, they can find it here. It’s received a great deal of entirely justified acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
I read it a few months ago after a good friend lent me his copy. It’s had such a sustained impact that I keep thinking about it. In a nutshell it’s about a man and his boy walking south through an America devastated by an unspecified disaster. The world as we know it has been destroyed and the remnant is an uninhabitable wasteland. The cause and details of this apocalypse are never elaborated because they are entirely unnecessary, as are the names of the father and child. The novel focuses exclusively on their relationship and their fears: the man’s fears for the boy’s safety, the boy’s fears for his father, their fear of fear itself. I should warn you that it is enormously sad, but in a very reflective fashion. It makes you appreciate not just the great loves of your own life, but things as small as clicking open the ring pull of a can of coke.
All this is sustained by McCarthy’s use of language. He’s so gifted that in the following NPR review he is accurately described as being able to make something as mundane as a microwave operations manual read like the King James Bible.
There are poets who would chop off their hands if only they could first write something as masterful as this book. I have some more books by McCarthy piled up to read in the New Year and after The Road am seriously considering reading nothing by anybody else until I have got through his complete works. I honestly do think he’s that good. Random House have the first few pages excerpted on their site, so you can get a flavour of the book there.
There was a film of The Road last year. It’s also very good, even if the trailer makes it sound a little like a zombie holocaust movie, not a haunting and beautiful struggle to find tins of baked beans among the ruins of civilization. A better taster of the film, and also a fitting taster for the book itself, is the soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. But read the book first – you won’t regret it.
