Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• 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

Brilliant but difficult
Having just finished this in 2 days and then reading the mixed reviews, I felt compelled to stick my own oar into the debate.

Overall it is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Set in a post apocalyptic world, it's meant to be depressing. The landscape is grey throughout and there is very little to take joy in. The descriptive passages are very repetitive and I found myself skipping forward at times barely reading sentences. So far so bad.

The writing style is absolutely infuriating. Part sentences. (Just like that one.) Many times I had to rewind to ascertain who was speaking in the passages of text. After a while I did get attuned to the style of writing and it didn't hinder my overall enjoyment of the book. But it was difficult for the first 50 pages or so.

As regards being given an insight into what could happen to our world, that's just rubbish. Anyone with a brain knows it's going to be pretty bad. We're not told what actually caused the destruction, but if it's a nuclear war or a giant meteor hitting the earth, I don't need an author telling me it's going to be tough going from now on.

So is there anything good in it and why did I give it 5 stars. Because of the relationship between the father and son. The situation is totally irrelevant. The dialogue between the two at first seems artifically brief, as if McCarthy has used it for literary style. But after a while I realised that a lot of the conversations between myself and my 6 year old daughter are similar. Oh yea we have big chats. But very often the dialogue is rat-a-tat with just a word or two from either. Not indicating coldness or distance, but reflecting the depth of understanding between us. So it was with the father and son. Often things were said which seemed like telepathy between the two. The strength of each, individually, or to be supportive, or to make the other proud, made me very aware of nuances in my own situation which I hadn't always been aware of.

As I said the situation is irrelevant. It could be a marriage break up, a death, a tough year at school, a disappointment in a football match, being let down by a friend - anything where one party is upset. It made me consider how good I would be as a father. What lengths would I go to help and protect my child? Maybe the situation would only last 5 minutes but would I respond then?

I agree with many of the reviewers who criticised this book. It is bleak. The writing style is difficult. The narrative doesn't flow and is confusing at times. But the insight into the relationship between a parent and child is heart-warming, optimistic, enlightening, awakening, helpful and thoroughly enjoyable.

Fair entertainment, but rather slow paced...
This is not to say I did not enjoy the book, but rather that it is not to everyone's taste. Much of the back story and current events are left vaguely sketched, leaving the reader to focus on the equally anonymous characters. Though the story grips at first and keeps you turning pages, towards the end it does become a grind, much like the journey of the two central characters themselves. The ending, though telegraphed from the early part of the book, is still somehow unsatisfying and rather hollow.

Stylistically, the book at first appears primitive, with no dialogue quotes and none of the "he said, they said" formatting usual to novels. Likewise there are no chapters and the writing is broken down into sections, some as short as a paragraph but none longer than a single page. Whilst this is hard to get to grips with at first, it quickly becomes quite easy to read (helped by the fact that rarely are more than two characters conversing).

Story-wise the book shows the daily struggle for survival quite well but suffers from some repetition. The sectional nature of the writing does keep you reading that little bit more and as a result I finished this in two sittings. Although running to some three hundred pages you should be aware that the text is double-line spacing, so a more accurate count would probably be nearer two hundred pages. Presumably this was to make it more readable, given the style of writing employed.

A number of points annoyed me about the characters, primarily the man's obsession with heading south, regardless of the opportunities presenting themselves along the way for some respite. Also the boy's innate whininess began to grate on me also before too long. Little background is revealed about the two, so it is hard to consider them well-developed.

All-in-all the book is a grim read, though far from the "terrifying journey" that some critics reviews would have it. Rather the journey is rather sluggish and occasionally alarming, but nothing that you would not expect given the apparent desolation that the apocalypse (whatever it was) has wrought.

Mostly the book just left me wanting more....More background, more information on the current state of the world and the two main characters and definitely more on the final fate of the boy. But these are not forthcoming which is a little frustrating.

Worth a read if you can adapt to the writing style and don't mind the slow pace of the story.

Well-written but I didn't like the story
The Road is full of pulled punches and unexplored strands that would have taken the story to interesting places, but the characters are content to stay in the relatively safe haven that is the middle of the Road on which they travel. Sure McCarthy can foreshadow that something terrible is about to happen, but then a page or two later you find out everything to be fine or are protagonists will run away in fear never to see the horrors again.

Sure it could have been a good analogy for how miserable a life of mediocrity can be, but I wasn't feeling the book in general.

When the film adaptation comes rolling around you'll definately hear alot of people saying 'nothing happens', but in this instance I'll actually understand what they mean, because not alot does.