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The Road
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Product Description
Review
Mesmerising... The best novel I read last year was McCarthy's No County for Old Men. I shall be astonished if this year I read anything better than The Road. --Mail on Sunday
Guardian
'Stunning...This is a shocking and brilliant work, at once
terribly pertinent and impressively universal.'
terribly pertinent and impressively universal.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
146 of 156 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a superb book,
By
This review is from: The Road (Hardcover)
I picked this up after reading a glowing review in the press. I'm completely new to Cormac McCarthy having never read any of his other works. I have to say this is a superb book.
The book is set in a post-apocalyptic future. Though it's never stated what exactly happened, the subtext suggests a nuclear winter following a war. The earth is burnt, all vegetation is dead and it rains and snows ash. The plot follows the journey of a man and his son towards the south in order to find somewhere they can do more than just survive. But as all food has now been plundered - this being several years since the disaster - they are always on the edge of starvation. They must travel without being seen, as most of humanity that is left has long since resorted to cannibalism to survive. What this is really about though is the extraordinary relationship between man and boy. The lengths that the man will go to protect his son and see him through the other end. It is a novel that for all its darkness is full of love. And wow is this dark. Many authors have written about the end of the world/survival but I don't think I've read anything quite this bleak. The scenery is utterly symapathetic to the couple's plight. It is filled with an overpowering poignancy for things lost - birds, cows, blue seas. This is a very sad but at the same time uplifting book. The language used is simple and the conversational parts between man and boy are deliberately kept short. A wonderful book that I couldn't put down until I'd finished.
56 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stark, terrible, powerful,
By
This review is from: The Road (Paperback)
Don't start with any illusions of this book - it isn't a story. There isn't a beginning and a middle and a neat end. The plot does not develop in any significant way. What you get is a ride of pure emotion, that is of an intensity that I've not really seen matched anywhere else. This isn't a tale about the end of the world. This is what it looks like at the end of the world, what it sounds and smells like, and more importantly what it feels like when you are man and boy facing death and the extinction of the species.
Cormac uses words sparingly, and doesn't bother with a lot of punctuation or structure. It's almost modern narrative poetry, as per Bukowski et al. This makes it a more challenging read, but he drags you in, relentlessly. It is very bleak, it is very difficult, but he makes it work. I'm not going to give examples because it's worth finding out for yourself. I read this almost entirely at night, in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in Devon, with everyone else asleep. And every night I went to bed drained by the experience of another chapter or so. If a book can move you to this degree, then what else can it be than a five stars?
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lyrical, beautiful, moving,
By
This review is from: The Road (Paperback)
I decided to read this book because the film was just about to come out. I was already familiar with the film's soundtrack (by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis) so in a way my perception of the book was already slightly biased. However, I did not expect a book on a dystopic, apocalyptic future, to be so easy to read, and so beautiful. When I say easy to read, I literally mean that it doesn't feel like an effort to keep turning the pages. There are novels that you struggle with, even when you enjoy them, but this is not one of them.
The story is simple. In a future that doesn't look distant at all, a man and his child are travelling along a road, going towards the sea, salvaging whatever they can find to survive, encountering horror and misery on their way. It's a bleak story, but the bleakness is not gratuitous. There is some hope at the end, some light shining through the ashen sky. I hadn't read any of Cormac McCarthy's novels prior to "The Road" - I certainly want to read more of his works now. The way he writes, in my opinion, is the nearest thing you can get to poetry, in prose form. It's just simply beautiful. "The Road" is certainly one of my top 10 favourite novels now, I hope it will become one of your favourites, too.
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