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Book Review : The Road by Cormac McCarthy


My first book review, and may as well start with the last book that I finished reading, The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy sort of made headlines recently, popping up on Twitter using a blue-tick profile, but it turns out that Twitter wrongly assigned the verification symbol. (I'll admit I thought he was dead too, turns out he's just very old)

This is the only novel by McCarthy that I've read, purely because I loved the film. I also enjoyed the film version of No Country For Old Men, so that may get added to my 'To Read' list, which always seems to be growing.

I may seem a little full of it by kind of dumping on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, but I'm going to dump a little anyway.

The story was great, even better than the movie, but it was the writing style that drove me crazy. Lack of punctuation, no chapter definition, and most of all, no quotation marks.

I would find myself half way through a sentence before realising that it was one of the very few characters speaking, and would then go back to read the sentence again from the intended perspective.

Mild Spoiler Alert

I'm going to keep spoilers to a minimum, only mentioning what I need to, to get my point across. 

The film stays very true to the book, but what I enjoyed most about the book was the vast landscapes of scorched earth caused by a nuclear fallout, while the cinematography of the film doesn't offer such scale.

The narrative is pretty much the same, a father and son struggling to stay alive in the autumn, as they journey south to survive another winter. I'm guessing New York to Florida, but it's never quite revealed where exactly in the US it takes place.

On their journey they encounter a lot more bad people than they do in the movies, or at least compared to how much screentime they are given. They are always on the lookout for wondering hoards of cannibals and thieves, who are ever present in the book.

McCarthy doesn't go into too much description in this short novel, and perhaps it was because I saw the movie before I read the book, that I was able to imagine the settings. To be fair though, it doesn't require much imagination; everything's burnt, the sky is always filled with ash clouds, and they're in the same ragged clothes.


Score

I really wanted to give this book a higher score, and even considering the how much I didn't enjoy how the book was written, I really enjoyed the story. It delved into the morality of people, as the father and son fled from the 'bad guys', the father slowly became just like them, while assuring his young son that they were the 'good guys', even after doing some not so good things.

I wouldn't say that he did bad things, but he was far from good when compared to behaviour in a civilized world. The moral of the story that I got from this book was that it's better to be bad and alive, than good and dead. By doing not so good things, by distrusting strangers, by being willing to do whatever it took to keep his son safe, even willing to put a bullet in his head rather than see him being eaten alive or starve to death, he kept his son from relative harm in the post apocalyptic world.

📗📗📗📗📗📗📗 (7/10)

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