The Road by Cormac McCarthy – Reviewed by Guy Portman
A cataclysmic event has left the world in ruins, and almost everything and everyone is dead. In the absence of food, the remaining humans are reduced to scavengers. Attempting to traverse the ravaged terrain are a father and his young son. They are heading south, in the hope of finding something better. Along the way they stumble upon tramp-like wretches, and on occasion the pair have to hide from gangs of looting cannibals. All the while they struggle to survive in this cold and gloomy land.
We never learn the names of the father and son. Perhaps this reflects the dwindled state of mankind, and how having degenerated to an animal-like existence, names are no longer meaningful in a world where sustenance and shelter are the only concerns.
There are numerous descriptions of decay, despair, deterioration and death. Idiosyncrasies include spaces between paragraphs, the absence of chapters and the omission of many apostrophes. Despite there not being much in the way of a plot, this dark fiction aficionado was impressed by this almost unrelentingly bleak, minimalist post-apocalyptic novel.
