Book Review: The Road

This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but a whimper.
--“The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
--“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost

“What’s the bravest thing you ever did?”
… “Getting up this morning,” he said.
--From The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A few days ago I had occasion to use the colloquial phrase, “It’s not the end of the world.” And after reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I can say that the end of the world will really be much, much, much worse. The Road is a brilliant and harrowing novel that has just a tiny ray of hope that makes the journey worth it. While I do not think it is Cormac’s best, if you can make it on The Road, you most certainly should. It is devastating on both a personal and a global level.
The Road follows the journey of an unnamed man and his son through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We never learn the exact cause of the apocalypse, but it looks to me like nuclear holocaust (fire) has brought on a nuclear winter (ice). What little plot the book has tells the story of the man and boy searching desperately for food and warmth through the dead wasteland. They also must evade the “bad guys” while keeping hope alive that they will find some other “good guys.” We don’t get a clear idea of how many other people still remain alive, but we do get some very, very disturbing glimpses of how some of the bad guys stay alive (cannibalism) and how society has completely collapsed (slaves).
One week after finishing The Road, I get two very visceral feelings when I think about it: hunger and cold. McCarthy does an absolutely brilliant job of making sure that the cold literally gets into your skin. He doesn’t simply tell you about the coldness. He makes you feel it by mentioning it over and over. When reading it, I began to notice that I couldn’t wait for the pages when the man and his son would get to build a fire. And as the cold seeps into your very bones, the cold may also start getting into your heart as well. The hunger happens in much the same way. So much of the book is concerned with finding food that you become much more aware of the feelings in your stomach. I have never read any piece of writing that made me so thankful to have access to food whenever I want it.
The brilliance of The Road is how the journey of the reader mirrors the journey of the father and son. As the disturbing images pile up and the cold takes hold of you, you may find yourself wishing that it (the book at least) would just all end. As a reader, you may start thinking, “How can I preserve any hope for the future in a landscape this bleak?” By the middle of the book, I was seriously depressed, but I knew that, as a reader, I had to make it through to the inevitable end. Amid all the depression, a few small moments of kindness and light kept my reader spirits up. And these are the very same feelings that the man and his son go through. They speak often of carrying “the fire,” but at times their spirits flag. The man looks often at the gun he constantly carries and worries about saving two bullets. The man knows that he must make it through to the inevitable end and preserve hope for his son. And sometimes a simple can of pears or a new found blanket will make the world seem just a little bit more liveable.
The Road is truly a journey for both the reader and the characters, with the major emotional catharsis coming in the last fifteen pages. I saw it coming, and still I wept as 250 pages of pent-up emotion suddenly poured out in one completely devastating passage.
The book that, for me, provides the most apt comparison to The Road is The Giver by Lois Lowry, and what provides the comparison is the color palate. The landscape of The Road is one of ash, dead trees, sunless skies, and decaying fields. The overriding image I have of the book is simply gray. Everything is gray, colorless and lifeless. The grayness and lifelessness actually depressed me more than anything else in the book. It really made me go outside and appreciate the color of the world. The Giver also is a colorless world, although for very different reasons (that post-apocalyptic society has eliminated racism by eliminating all colors). The ends of the two books also share similarity in their coldness and ambiguous hope.
And surprisingly, it also reminded me of Lord of the Rings. Apparently, nuclear winter will look an awful lot like Mordor, and the last surviving “good guys” will look a lot like two little hobbits carrying a sacred fire, out alone in the wild world. Mordor is a landscape of fire and ash and poisonous smoke, and the only thing that gets Frodo and Sam across that perilous landscape is their love for each other. Likewise, the only thing that keeps the man and his son going on the road is their love for each other. And like the most brilliant, poignant moments of Lord of the Rings, The Road challenges us to find hope where no hope remains, not in the world at large, but in each other.
The only other comparison I can make is actually to Holocaust media. At times The Road is as hard to read as Holocaust accounts, and indeed, the book has images more accustomed to Holocaust media: famished people on the run and even more disturbingly, burned corpses on the side of the road and corpses inside a semi-truck. But unlike so much Holocaust media, The Road never preaches. We never know the exact nature of the catastrophe that befell the world, so we cannot place any blame on anyone.
Even though the true story of The Road is the man and his son, the book has a few very subtle messages about society at large. British environmentalist George Monbiot wrote, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem." The Road never announces itself as an environmentally conscious work, but that reading is inevitable. In many tales of survival, such as Robinson Crusoe, the human protagonist forges a relationship with the natural world. Nature provides that which civilization no longer does. The Road is a whole new kind of survival tale because the natural world cannot provide anything. The man and his son cannot go back to living off the land because the land is dead. They rely on canned food and plastic raincoats to survive. Humans can always survive even without civilization. This book asks an entirely new question: how can humans survive both without civilization and without nature? Obviously they cannot, which leads the reader to imagine, quite truly, the end of the world.
I won’t lie—The Road is very, very depressing. But if you can get beyond the depression you will find a brilliant novel that will affect you to your core and truly make you think differently about the world.