The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I just joined a book group and the book for our next meeting is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I though I share some of my thoughts.

it is a dark novel in a dismal and disturbing world with difficult images and gritty realism. The story is about a father and his son traveling to the coast set in a post-apocalyptic world devoid of any life but some people, ash and ashen snow. It is not a typical post-apocalyptic book though, the reader is not told any reasons for the state the world is in, we all can imagine many possibilities in today's world. This dark and inhabitable world works as a back drop by reducing everything to the bare minimum, allowing the focus on survival and relationship between father and son.

I did not care for McCarthy's style of writing. Though the sparse punctuation was actually befitting, his prose is a strange mix of minimalism and a constructed style that seems over thought and over worked. I found the incomplete and fragmented sentences very distracting. It made the reading process an arduous one, filled with frustrated rereading and prohibited fluidity and really diving into the story. 

The surroundings are well described and felt, and the sounds and visuals are vivid. The dark nights with the terrible frozen cold are interestingly juxtaposed with the movements of the twirling ashes. The people and places though stay undefined on purpose, the reader can gleam a tiny bit of insights into the father's history by his dreams and thoughts, but they are kept to a minimum because it does not matter anymore. 

The story line presents itself intentionally repetitive and tedious. It was a bit annoying to me how they always found food on the brink of starvation. Regarding the end it was clear that the father had to die and come to terms with the inability to end the life of his child and instead leave him alone. What I did not care for was this wholesome good family show up and take the son. It was contrived and convenient and it was also sappy and not appropriate in the context of the story. When we lived in California, we often were invited to screenings to see movies before the final editing, to see how people react to the story and if they understand the characters, but mostly to make changes to it to widen its appeal. Resulting is often a supposedly better, but ultimately bad ending (think Pretty Woman) that gets pasted on, never really fitting though. 

One of the themes in the book is good vs. bad. The son is good, pure and innocent (yet always scared), the father declares himself as good, but is he? The father slowly turns immoral, putting the survival of his son and himself above helping other people, survival of the fittest. One could argue that in a world like that it would the only way to be, but since everybody is eventually going to die anyway, would that survival above all not be futile?The son is clearly disturbed by the father's inability to see that. Even though father and son categorize the world into good guys and bad guys, the world is not that black and white, it is grey - figuratively and literally -  indeed. The question about what is good and what is bad, forces itself out of the book into the readers head. Concerning morality and ethics, do the values from gone civilizations still hold true?

Like any story set in a post apocalyptic world it reminds of what is truly important, leaves one with an uneasy feeling, also confronts us with the truth that what we have might be gone in an instant and the ultimately the only thing that matters and lasts, even outlasts death is love and coupled with love are hope and faith. If anything this book was about love and about hope. The hope carried me through to the end, at which there is nothing, the goal that carries father and son forward does not get rewarded. It is a let down for the protagonists as well as the reader, though I was not excepting anything different. But in the most dire situations it is hope against hope that gives strength to carry on. It is a world with only one certainty: death and that is a parallel to our lives, even though we have food and shelter and families, in the end that is the only certain thing there is and it seems that between the fragments of hope and the knowledge that there are two bullets in the revolver is where this story is relevant to everybody. Ultimately everybody struggles and if there would not be a sliver of hope and/or faith, we could just give up to live. In the book the deep love for his son makes the father keep going. The mother chose the other alternative and killed herself, leaving the father with no other choice as to stay alive and protect his son. Death itself can be a hope though when things are tough and the book shows how that is a dilemma parents are in, because children take that type of hope away. I am not sure I can adequately express my point here.

I liked this book on some levels and really disliked it on others. Obviously I feel ambiguous about this novel, I think it is interesting and is definitely a great book to think and talk about. I have a few doubts though about the importance it has been given. It left me depressed, I did not experience the uplift that a lot of fans had the joy to feel, if anything I was actually disappointed because it did not give me any profound insight or revelation, it offered no interesting new viewpoint and it lacked depth. On the other hand, I have to admit that