2007 books

[peteryoung]

102) Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006
A nameless father and his son head south on the roads of America after a nuclear war, hungry, wary and often on the run. The Road proves that it's still possible to conjure gripping stories from the thinnest of plots, and the frequent negotiations between the man and his boy read like an unspoken transaction: the father has to remind the boy of the need for courage, and equally often the terrified boy, who has never known any other kind of world, must remind his father of his humanity. It's the absence of any back-story, which one might expect from a fully realised bona fide SF novel, which made me think no, this isn't science fiction – any specifics as to what brought about a nuclear war would be irrelevant to the emotional heart of McCarthy's story. His pared-down prose echoes their spare existence, making this a grim and bleak read, and I wonder if T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' may have formed part of McCarthy's inspiration ("I will show you fear in a handful of dust"). It's just a shame that The Road doesn't quite live up to some of the adulatory excesses of the 32 pull-quotes used on the cover of the UK edition; nevertheless, still an excellent and necessary book.

Comments

[ramtops.livejournal.com]

I'm reading this at the moment, and it was _very_ hard to put it down and come to my desk.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing your review but not reading it at the time (because I hadn't started the book yet). I finished it last night so I had to travel back in time and leave a comment. ;-)

I didn't pick up the Waste Land connection, but it's certainly a possibility! I'll have to go back and re-read the poem.

As for the sci-fi aspect, I think it would have taken away from the story if we found out more details about what exactly had happened (my theory is that it was a meteor strike). The novel, in a way, asks us to fill in the blanks with our a priori sci-fi knowledge; build the horror with our imagination which has already been filled by countless b-movies and imaginary terrors. I think it was a smart decision on his part because it intensified the relationship between the two characters and made the shadows seem more terrifying than they actually were (looking back, those horrible cannibals and survivors are really just starved stick figures reaching out in desperation for any food that walks by).

I'm very curious to see where he goes next!