Customer Reviews
bleak and intensly believable - By: phil mars, 22 Jul 2008 
the spare style is perfect for the mood of this book. there are no wasted words to distract you from it's grinding inevitability. each dialogue is a tender vignette.
A modern classic - By: Mark Andrew, 22 Jul 2008 
The main appeal for me was the post-apocolyptic setting & the scenario of day-to-day survival. This is such an interesting topic as Cormac McCarthy gives to us a month's journey which brings every aspect of being into question.
The man & his son are forced to travel across the ruin that is now America. Disaster of some kind (Poss Nuclear) is evident & it looks pretty certain that the world has suffered as a single body. Nothing grows, the winds are colder & humanity is sparse - to the point of extinction.
The road is a bleak tale with redemption found in simple things such as the finding of food & clothing. Cormac McCarthy describes in alarming surreality the bonds that tie us & what we would have to do in times of ultimate peril.
So what makes the road so engrossing?
The style of McCarthy's writing for this particular story is not the standard affair & the descriptions are so desperately real the reader has no choice but to put his/herself into the mind of the protagonist.
There are some pretty grim scenes in this story which will stay with you a long time...but the true horror is realising what we, as a race, will do to survive.
This is the kind of read that stays with you long after the last page has been turned. The theme of survival & emotional crisis are strong, not once does the book lose sight of its goal & the reader does get carried along, albeit stressfully. I found the first quarter of the story to be utterly depressing & I just couldnt see hope...
This is a fantastic book. At times uneventful, at other times bitterly realistic...what more can I say.
Indelible - By: A Father, 11 Jul 2008 As a fairly new parent Ive spent moments imagining worst case scenario's relating to my son & the emptiness that must follow. This book gave me that same wrenching physical feeling of loss, only magnified to levels I had never imagined. Loss of everything including, in the darkest moments where bravery gives way to reality, hope. No fiction has ever made me feel so desperately sad. For me the scenario isnt what hurts, its the love.
Desperately good - By: M. Harrison, 08 Jul 2008 It is odd to recommend so strongly a book in which there is so little pleasure in the reading. From the opening sentences of The Road you are left in no doubt that this is going to be a tough journey. The central characters never have names. The prose is so pared down that even a comma soon comes to represent a feature in the landscape of the page. Even dialogue is given none of the normal grammatical flourishes.
Two figures - a man & a young boy - struggle to survive in a post apocalyptic landscape. Everything is burnt. Ash is like snow. Those who survived the initial conflagration have long since passed by, looted the food, & now learnt to live by preying on each other. The man & the boy travel in hope, but with fading expectation. And as the reader is drawn more closely to their ordeal, their hope fades too.
This is not a book to be constantly picked up & put down: the monotony of survival which provides the plot will make the plot itself seem monotonous. Read it instead in a burst. If you do you will get your reward. You will then experience the poetry of the barren prose in the barren landscape, & how it only serves to make the flame of human spirit which is at the centre of the book shine more brightly. And then graduallly, & paradoxicallly, you will begin to enjoy reading.
Because oddly, brilliantly, & almostly unbearably sadly, this bleak book is entirely about the human spirit. It is like a humanist anthem: a tale of how when everything is gone, including religion, the flame of loyalty, love & devotion is almost impossible to extinguish.
By the end, which I read on the Tube, I was openly crying - it was impossible to do otherwise.
The Road has already secured its status as a modern classic. In years to come schoolchildren will be made to write essays on it, & doubtless seek out unintended metaphors & meanings. So read it now, before it is burdened by too much fame, & be enriched by its simple, skeletal beauty.
The Road - By: M. Stevens, 08 Jul 2008 
A 'Road' to boredom, better than any anaesthetic. A good read for those who annuallly roll about in Glastonbury mud! The words 'just awful' compliment this dire read.
Mike
