The Road

The Road was written by Cormac McCarthy in 2006. I just finished reading it. Here we go.

The characters are the most important aspect of a book. Still true, and here's the cool thing, this book only has pretty much two characters: the man and the boy. You don't even get names. There are other characters, but they show up for maybe a page or five and then are gone. The one name you get is an old  guy named Elly, and that turns out to be a lie. Who's ever named Elly anyways? So let's do the two characters and I'll give you all a summary too. And also, in such a book as this, the descriptions are the most important thing You'll see in a second.

So this book, I'd like to say, displays impressionist writing, meaning, according to my definition, that the writer puts together images and scenes that create an impression, an emotion and understanding rather than a chronological timeline or cause and effect thing, or whatever. It's great stuff, trust me. The book's post-apocalyptic, and the apocalypse doesn't happen in the book, so basically, the most typically exciting thing had already passed. This book is just the effects of the world's destruction. The world is burnt, I guess. They never really explain it. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that the father loves the boy as much as any father had ever loved his boy. What matters is that the boy loves the father as much as any boy had ever loved his father. They have no food but what they could scavenge. The disaster was years ago and so the world had already been raped to its poorest core. There are good guys and bad guys, though you don't see good guys very often, you just hope they exist. The boy and the father "carry the fire" and they do it in withering hopes. The bad guys are awful. They basically rape you, kill you, and then eat you. That's pretty darn frightening, I think, and so the two are crazy freaked and have this one pistol that they protect like no other, and hold a promise of mutual suicide in the case of direness. After that, they just try to survive for as long as they can. No long term goals. Just vaguely going south. Main issues: hunger, cold, people trying to kill you. That's the book. Pretty much.

So basically, the book is pretty level the entire time, with the most exciting thing, the "Apocalypse" happening before the book, and all the rest being the effects shown through the day to day, almost journal-like recordings, in description of the tiny vantage points of two very normal characters. So, it's easy to hate the book, especially with all these modern, "the outcome is what matters" states of minds. But if you appreciate the characters and especially the writing style, it's wonderful, because that's pretty much all this book is: words put together in a certain style to create a mood that lets you into the characters, showing the most distant, strange world of The Road in an almost understandable way. So characters and writing style, especially writing style for me. Here we go.

The book is in third person past tense, like right after it happens though, and you never veer away from the two. You get their thoughts when they want you to hear it, but a lot goes unsaid in the book, creating a very minimal world. Minimal Dialog. It's great stuff. You don't get so much dialog in this book, and the cool thing is McCarthy never uses quotation marks, nor some other punctuation. But the dialog is definitely very interesting. It is arranged like poetry, and all  their line lengths are usually about the same, three or four words. The two are minimal. The boy says "I don't know" and "Okay" with such frequency, you'd think he was intentionally determined on creating the vaguest understandings possible. The father says a bunch of catch phrases. He's a great father. We'll get into it later. Last, aside from dialog, you get a lot of nature description, thoughts about nature, and you get dreams too, and sometimes random tangent thoughts. You gotta be pretty quick I guess. It's no issue though, reading this book. It's pretty straightforward, just get used to it. Right, ell, here's some dialog.

They're going to kill those people, arent they?
Yes.
Why do they have to do that?
I dont know.
Are they going to eat them?
I dont know.
They're going to eat them arent they?
Yes.
And we couldnt help them because they'd eat us too.
Yes.
And that's why we couldnt help them.
Yes.
Okay.

Wow it's amazingly hard to deliberately leave out apostrophes. Moving, no? There's so much you could say by saying so very little. Oh! One more thing. This book has no chapter but many, many blank lines to divide. Interesting, I think.

K, the dad. So, he dad is an amazingly wonderful person. He worries a lot. He dreams about his wife a lot. She's out of the picture though. I'll leave that for y'all to find out from the book. Um, he's great in panic situations, which is the most helpful thing ever. Actually, this description is actually really boring. He's just a genuinely good guy. You grow intimate with him. You could only say specific acts, like when you're asked to describe a friend. What do you say? That he's nice. Well sure, and then you say that he knows how to shoot a guy in the forehead and he feels extraordinarily guilty afterwards. Stuff like that. He has mad survival skills.

The boy, now that's a bot easier. The boy as been through everything. He was born after the disaster. He has golden hair. He is always filthy. They tie rags around their ankles for shows. He cries a lot, but always for other people or out of guilt. He cried like crazy for the little boy he saw randomly. He cries so much for the robber. He consistently forces the father to be good. The boy believes in God. He asks if crows can fly high enough to see the sun. He asks if they could leave messages in the sand for the good guys in case they come by. He jumps up and down when he is frightened. He had a yellow truck. He likes to swim. He has thin ribs. He likes coca cola. He says okay to everything. He makes promises with here dad. Never leave, he says, always says. He is the voice of God, or so his dad thinks. He has alien eyes on his skinny, skinny face. I love that boy.

So some crazy moments. Well, there's the one in that first house, that dream about the girl, there's getting sick on the beach, there's the truck, there's the arrow, there's the bunker. There are beautiful moments, beautifully horrible and beautifully kind. It's inspirational on the long run. I can't really say much, but I feel I can paint this better than anything. It's impressionist. He throws away the flute, the boy. He doesn't tell stories. He sees the baby, he sees the lighting-struck places.

There's the end. But most of all, there are the words. Some peaceful words. Some abstracts. Have you watched Life is beautiful? The Italian film. Same thing. The holocaust is pretty much the apocalypse anyways. The mist too. Same thing. Um. Of Mice and Men too, to an extent. There's just that love there. Unconditional. It's irrevocable. You'd do anything for them. The ones you can protect.

"The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

"Out on the road the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as tracklers and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."

"Ok. This is what the good guys do. They keep trying They don't give up."

"He lay there a long time, lifting up the water to his mouth a palmful at a time. Nothing in his memory anywhere of anything so good."

Read, folks. Read.