A boy, a man and a gun travel on a deserted road through destroyed cities to get to the coast on Cormac McCarthy’s newest novel The Road.
McCarthy’s 10th novel The Road, describes the post apocalyptic vision what often looks like the Texas-Mexico border. The cities are in ashes and charred corpses are everywhere.
There is no explanation of what destroyed the Earth except for a quick flashback that hints to nuclear holocaust.
“The clocks stopped at 1:17 with a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.’’
The novel begins calmly in the woods with an unnamed man waking up from a strange dream, to check on his young son and the rise and fall of ‘‘each precious breath.’’
The man, the boy and their gun make the journey through a desolate landscape to find their way to the coast. All they have is each other, their gun and a shopping cart that they refill with food, tools, fuel and anything else that they find throughout their journey.
Along the road they see countless men in gas masks killing, raping and cannibalizing as they fight for their own survival.
During the day the man fights for their survival and at night he dreams of a world that is no more. Memories and flashbacks of his lingering wife, who opted for suicide by saying, “I am done with my own whorish heart.”
The boy has no memory of the world as it once was, because he was not born before the holocaust occurred.
McCarthy’s novel is a story of hope and perseverance in a world that lacks both. The boy becomes the conscience of the two as he often asks, “are we still the good guys?”
Looks like the man has lost his way as he is more concerned with surviving and cannot see the good in people anymore and will much rather shoot his way into towns than help or ask for help.
The vivid description of a destroyed world makes the reader live, if only for a moment, in this world.
The reader can feel the rain when the author describes it and the cold when the temperature is freezing and hope to find the coast as they travel down the road.
