Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #117 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
Mesmerising... The best novel I read last year was McCarthy's No County for Old Men. I shall be astonished if this year I read anything better than The Road. --Mail on Sunday

Guardian
'Stunning...This is a shocking and brilliant work, at once
terribly pertinent and impressively universal.'

Mail on Sunday
`Mesmerising... The best novel I read last year was McCarthy's No County
for Old Men. I shall be astonished if this year I read anything better than
The Road.'

Customer Reviews

A fine copy of Grapes of Wrath
It's an interesting book for McCarthy to have written, but comes across rather affected in places.

If you've read some of his others, you'll be familiar witht he hard, sparse prose, the wonky or absent punctuation and the rythmic-poetic metre of the storytelling. What is different here is that the sentences are much shortened (compared with The Crossing or Pretty Horses for example)....and that's when I started to smell the rat.

McCarthy is trying to write a modern-day Grapes of Wrath. He has aped Steinbeck's short, compact prose. He's copied the allegorical journey into a dysfunctional world. He's even borrowed the slender-thread-of-hope-from-human-kindness ending. The interspersing of greater themes into otherwise ordinary narrative is there too, and so is the keystone-based descriptive mannerism (gray gray gray gray).

I liked the book. It's a good copy...but it *is* a copy.

J

Brilliant but so incredibly sad
Having never read anything by Cormac McCarthy before, I picked this book up and read the outside cover and thought, hey why not? It took a couple of pages to get used to the lack of speech marks and the limited narrative and after that I was hooked. I read all kinds of books, historical, sci fi, chick lit, classics etc and I have to say this is one of the best books I've read in a long while. As some other reviewers have stated, the story will stay with the reader for a long time. I know it will for me. I did feel sad afterwards and wondered about the boy and his future but hey, we don't all read books for the happy endings....

Borrow it from a library, if you must read it
I am immensely puzzled by McCarthy's fame. I keep thinking I should love his books, but I just don't. People I admire and whose opinions I trust urge his books on me and I conclude that these people must be nuts. I managed to read All the Pretty Horses. Goodness, what a waste of time. I read about ten pages of No COuntry for Old Men, hoping desperately that it would grip me. No luck.

So, when I read the first few pages of The Road and instantly felt the kind of exhilaration I wanted to get from his other books, I bought it. Should have saved some cash and visited the local library. Once you get the gist of the narrative framework (post-apocalyptic, father and son trying to reach safety, bad guys everywhere), that's it. It is left to Mr. McCarthy to fill in the graphic details, tick the boxes that will make people feel a bit queezy, and then end the story -- with possibly the most schmaltz you can imagine. I won't spoil it, but it seems clear to me that the author had no idea how to wrap up a story that was utterly bereft of hope (there is a way: be more European about it and don't shy away from the abyss).

Unlike some people, I did not find myself repelled by the bits that are graphic or by the apparent amorality of the tale (in fact, those are the things that made it too samey for my liking). If you are sensitive to such things, definitely do not read this book. You will not feel psychologically or emotionally enriched.

On the positive side, the book is written in a brisk style and a rainy Sunday should be all the time you need to read it. If you buy a copy, you can donate it to a charity shop when you're finished. I can't see this on anyone's list of books to read again and again.