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 The end of the world November 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The world has ended. A man and his boy are just trying to stay alive. They can trust no-one, they can't trust the food, they can't trust the land. They just keep following the road. The road, of course, is life, you don't need a degree in English Literature to figure that one out.
This is the first time I've read McCarthy. I saw No Country for Old Men at the cinema, and I heard about the Road winning awards, so I figured I'd give it ago. He's a very sparse writer. It would be hard to say there are characters in the novel as everything is reduced down to survival, and the main character is constantly at the point of giving up his principles and humanity in the face of everything he has lost, but hangs on for his boy. There is no flowery description, just enough to evoke the situation with a few carefully chosen words. Sometimes the sparseness, the rendering of sense to a short sentence, is beautiful in its construction. There's no room for trickery, you have to take the prose on its merits.
Details are few. You don't know why the world ended (though there is a sense that, to paraphrase Charlton Heston, the maniacs blew it up) and you don't get any names.
A lot of the professional reviews talk about cynicism and pessimism in the novel, but that's not true. It is relentless. It's about maintaining your humanity, it's about sacrifice, and devotion and principles, in the face of despair.
It's not the first treatment of the idea, by any means. I don't even think it's the best. But it is exceptionally good. And it is highly recommended.
So I'm off to read the back catalogue of this writer and see what I've missed.
 I cant believe the hype, seriously disappointing November 28, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is rubbish, in appearence its like a first draft by a novice writer, there's no punctuation and the grammer becomes confused and it becomes a bit of a task reading it.
The story is told in a series of short paragraphs, for some of McCarthy's reading public this seems to have a lot of appeal and people are waxing lyrical about it being like poetry but I've just found it tedious and trying to read so far. I also find it maddening that the characters have no names and are constantly referred to as "the man" and "the boy". In truth I've enjoyed the Wikipedia, reviews and second hand information about the book more than the book itself so far.
Its not a work of stand alone brilliance in terms of post-apocalytpic fiction either. Narratives about paternal figures struggling to protect their nearest and dearest in "end of days/dying sun" style struggles for existence have been done before. Its not as original a story telling tool as a lot of reviews seem to think, what about Stephen King's The Mist? Or David Brin's The Postman?
Unlike some of McCarthy's other critics I liked the idea that no conclusions where reached about what had lead to the protagonist's predictament or what the fate of the world was. Its not impossible to fill in the gaps, nuclear disaster, solar flare, environmental crisis, whatever. Its not essential to the storyline and it allows for more of a focus upon the day to day trials of "boy" and "man" on the run from cannibals, peadophiles and other assorted dregs.
Which I think is what McCarthy was aiming at, its a real shame no one told him to write it properly, there's the beginnings of something decent here but that's all it is, a "could have been".
Tell us why! November 27, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you are one of those people that needs to know the answers to questions then this is NOT the book for you. I couldn't get into this book as questions were raised but never answered. Maybe that was the idea and I've missed the point entirely. I just found it incredibly difficult to read. The lack of speech marks made it difficult to tell who was talking at times meaning whole scenes became confused and disjoined. And I didn't like that way the main characters were stripped of any identity as they were never given names. The only thing that kept me reading to the end was the hope that I might get some answers as to what has happened to the Earth, obviously a hugely catastophic disaster, but how, why, who???? I persevered to the end . . . then wished I hadn't bothered!
 No more water but the fire next time November 27, 2008
Quote after quote, snippets of eulogy one after the other, proliferate across the back cover, inside covers and the long lead in to this book. All the heavyweights, the broadsheets but Time Out and the Big Issue too, lunge in. Everywhere there is `terrifying', `thrilling', `beautiful', nightmare', `amazing', `spectacular', `emotionally shattering' - `a masterpiece that will soon be considered a classic'. Buffeted by the sustained force of such prior judgements, I find myself coming to such books with an unease that I may not engage or find myself moved. If it's good enough for Kirsty Wark, maybe it's too good for me.
But I did find this a compelling read. Without chapters but presented in small chunks, this structure projected the despairing tone, the unchanging and relentless pattern of the days, and the dread that the few flickers of humanity surviving the unnamed apocalyptic event that has befallen the world could have no longer term future.
The two characters, almost the only two to appear in the book, are without names, a father and his son, pushing a broken down supermarket trolley containing their only possessions along roads frequently clogged with ash. In fact, in amongst sustained and beautiful prose, the wind blown ash and the tarp under which they shelter, recur over and over. With the whole world seemingly burned, broken and stripped bare, the poetic context of the writing pushes these entities to the fore, reflecting the deeply human propensity to build a sense of order, security and predictability in even the most hostile of circumstances.
It is writing of a very high order that can grab a reader and make him or her care so strongly about two people who have no names, no history to speak of, and little to do with their days than push on down `the road' in the vague belief that things may be better at its end. The conversation between these two is sparse but as the novel proceeds the reader builds an intimacy with them through witnessing their brief exchanges in the face of terrror, annihilation, hope and the construction of a sense of purpose and morality.
There are a couple of brief moments in this book of sheer horror centring around the deterioration of many survivors into cannibalism and its associated violence and wickedness. But the writing is subtle and menace is also conveyed by images such as the wing mirror attached to the wonky trolley in an attempt to give some prior warning of threats from behind.
Does this book hold out any hope? Is it ultimately, if only even narrowly, redemptive, as some of its reviewers suggest? I would advise others to read this majestic and totally absorbing novel and then ponder deeply such fundamental questions.
Soul wrenching, moving, haunting - Stunning. November 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was the second Cormac book I read, the first being No Country for Old Men. Nothing prepared me, including Cormacs previous work, for the shear magnitude of dread or emotion this book emoted from me at every page.
I finished this book last year and it still evokes feelings in me. I cannot recommend this enough, although I wouldn't read it around the Christmas period, it might take the shine off the Yule tide celebrations.
"Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it." - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
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