I loved this book, which is an odd thing for me to say, given that I usually don’t like stories without a plot, which this is.

The Road is a post apocalyptic tale about a man and his son as they travel to the coast in the midst of a deepening nuclear winter.  That’s it.  End of story.  I mean literally that’s the entirety of the novel.  They follow this unnamed road to the coast in the hopes that it will be easier to find food there and that they can follow it south, thinking it will lead them to a warmer climate. The story doesn’t even start with the cause of the disaster, you only get a little taste of it in a flashback, instead we begin following the man and his boy about ten years after the event that has killed the world.  Sorry if I spoiled it for you, but trust me, even knowing what it’s all about the book is worth reading.

Cormac McCarthy has a minimalist writing style that some people don’t like and to be honest, I found it mildly annoying in No Country for Old Men and sometimes confusing in Blood Meridian. In The Road however I felt it not only worked well, but fit perfectly with the subject and themes of the novel. The author doesn’t like quotation marks to denote dialog, and he uses commas as if they were more precious than Californium. It works here though. The world is dying, the sky is a constant grey cloud through which the sun cannot completely penetrate. The plants are all dead, there are no wild animals, few people and Cormacs sparse use of punctuation accentuates this bleakness.

What made the biggest impact on me was the way the characters of The Man and The Boy (the author never does name them) interact with each other and the few people they meet. In a world where resources are scarce, survival is the main priority and The Man does everything he can to keep himself and his son alive, but at the same time, he’s trying to raise his son to be a good person and instill in him the values he had been taught. That brings them into conflict often. He teaches his boy that we are the good guys, stealing is wrong… but when you’re starving? More importantly, when your CHILD is slowly dying of starvation? We help people… but when you have next to nothing yourself and you come upon an old blind man who has even less? Those are the moments that stick out for me, you can tell the boy is aching to do the “right thing” as he has been taught, but the man who taught him these things is willing to ignore morality to keep them alive. That’s what makes this book for me.  It’s not about a grand quest, it’s just about two people struggling to stay alive and stay “human”.