The Road

I finished The Road, the new Cormac McCarthy novel, on Tuesday evening, racing through the last 100 or so pages in one go. It is very, very good.

I got it as a present from my brother Colin who knows I've been a big McCarthy fan since reading Blood Meridian in college, and All the Pretty Horses is another on my top books list. I don't know if The Road is up there, but it is still very, very good.

(quick plot outline - father and son wander across a post-apocalyptic american countryside, scavenging for food in the ruins of houses and cities and trying to avoid murderous mad max style road agents)

Blood Meridian and The Road are quite similar in a number of ways. There is the trail across a bleak American countryside for the most obvious thing. The clearly described violence and death. The beautifully sparse prose. The unjudgemental tone. The biblical resonances. The lack of female characters. The cannibalism. The Road has stunning images of burnt corpses, people starving and trapped underground, the boy swimming in the sea), which are now (metaphorically of course) seared onto the inside of my eyelids.

But where Blood Meridian is primal and, well, bloody, The Road is more detached. It is a much more accessible (read potentially popular) book I think. The father - son relationship is painfully captured and there is much more emotion. People will cry while reading this book (although I didn't. obviously).

Where Blood Meridian was more episodic, The Road is one long build-up, and reading it I was completely wracked with tension. It gets pretty hard to concentrate on what is going on now at times, as you are constantly fearful of what is coming. There are times when they don't eat. There are times when they are hiding. There are times when they have to defend themselves. You are fairly sure that there is not going to be a particularly happy ending and every time the two got separated I was speed reading till they were both safe.

The father and son do not talk much, but when they do you listen. He has told his son that they are the good ones, who are carrying the flame even through this post-apocalyptic nightmare. They don't discuss what this flame might be. They don't need to. It is very, very, very sad.