"The Road" Review

Zack Pascal

Ana June

ENG-220-036

11/19/2015

LINKED MATERIAL http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000OI0G1Q/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

The Road Review

 “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy is a well-known novel which is known at a mainstream level as a post-apocalypse setting in which a story of survival takes place. Before reading the book I had the nebulous impression from the main stream that it was an extremely depressing doom and gloom type story. Instead this novel was far more defiant survival story, which was full of depressing doom and gloom.

The raw summery of the book is fairly simple. Father and son travel through a looted and rotting world for the smallest embers of hope of hidden stores of supplies, heading south seeking warmer weather and maybe a real solution to their situation. This post-apocalypse has your mainstays of the setting type, your cannibals and burnt hell scape of a world. Less common but associated concepts for the cynical side of the setting is starving and dis-empowerment. Now the freezing due to weather is honestly the first instance that I have experienced in a post-apocalypse setting type, most authors default to the desert wasteland style. Throughout the book the reader is presented scenes of desperation brought by starvation and apparent finality of the suffocating dark. Punctuated with bone soaking rain and frozen ash covered landscapes. Between these scenes are small moments of respite, the highs on these extreme lows, if it wasn’t for these moments the book would be straight up unpalatable.

            The story is indeed fairly positive as a written work. But a few elements were lost on first reading. These elements were: Time frame, Setting visibility, and some not as critical but mostly strange until you learn how the author writes: Dialog. The time frame presented in the book is totally nebulous which I know is intentional but many elements simply couldn’t work without at least some time set aside for these elements to take place. Namely time wise it is the duration into the current apocalypse and the age of the child, with the descriptions of the father giving up on keeping a calendar and the child being old enough to read and speak well but having no knowledge of the pre-apocalypse would maybe place the child at age 6 at most which makes some of the imagery hard to take with mechanical erosion (Expanding ice) type damage hard to ignore as being the main entropic force in the area. Unless the case was that the area was normally significantly warmer so that the extremes of weather presented is very new which is not well presented beyond winters getting harsher early in the book as why they were traveling south. The other issue I had was as a reader I was unable to get a decent sense of overall visibility which was presented only a couple times, very clearly the sky is life strangling overcast and persistent but horizontal visibility is only presented as a part of the landscape as limited in the last forth of the book which leaves the landscape under presented until that point. And finally the author doesn’t use quotation marks for dialog, this is surprisingly off putting and took me out of the book, however in best case this pulls the reader farther away from the story to an observer position…but this could just be me making up a reason.

            As far as environmental messages go, there isn’t much there beyond a tapestry presented as what person would do to survive within the apocalyptic wasteland where society wanes in the wake of the presumably nuclear sun which graced the land.

            The audience I would recommend it towards would be writers wanting to present a doom and gloom setting. However the book was probably intended towards the general populace to ward off the appeal of the nuke as a weapon, otherwise the story is extremely agnostic to the cause effects and why I would instead tell contemporaries about how to present a landscape.

            The Road is not a flawless book. This book is sometimes janky in its presentation of interaction of characters to the world but creates impressive scenery and feel of the world. This book leads me to recommend the book to other writers interested in improving their landscape writing. Otherwise I jokingly boil this book down to this grossly inaccurate phrase “The Road is like the later Mad Max films except less people and car chasing, but far more starving and freezing to death.” This is mostly joking but after this over all depressing book I’ll be taking a couple more scraps of positivity I can reach for.