The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I finished reading McCarthy's The Road yesterday. Two things made me want to read this novel: a) I watched and loved No Country for Old Men; b) upon research, critics were calling it McCarthy's best work. I thought, better than NC4OM? How can it go wrong? I suggested it as the January pick for Book Club... turned out all the other suggestions were too popular or not popular enough, but The Road was juuust right.

The book itself is very quick read: minimalist and haunting. Descriptions of the post-apocalyptic world, covered in ash and burned raw, are so vivid I could almost smell the char and taste the grit. In direct contrast, there is very little dialogue; what little exists is kept free of adjectives and biases. There are no character descriptors, no sense of time passing and no explanation of how the man and boy got to where they are. The novel begins in media res and doesn't stop to explain much. Their journey south to the sea is dangerous and teeming with horror; in a memory, the man's wife sums it up chillingly: "Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They'll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it" (p.48). But face it we do. McCarthy paints an unflinching portrait of humanity's capacity for extremism: love and depravity, hope and nihilism, innocence and blood-chilling reality. Like NC4OM, there are no neat-and-tidy Hollywood endings. There is however the journey and the road that gets us there.
...the whole time I was reading it I thought, this has to be a movie. I was right.

We almost didn't read this fabulous novel after someone realised it was also an "Oprah Pick" ... convincing the Club to read another off this list after the Corrections disaster was obviously worth the effort. Good to know we're not the only anti-Oprah people out there.