Not Your Usual Road Trip

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
New York : Knopf, 2006.
1st U.S. ed.
241 p. ; 25 cm.

This was a great book to read after the two disaster books by Pfeffer. McCarthy is an amazing stylist, his dialogue often reads like a liturgy and his effects are poetic. I was also struck how this takes the familiar American "road" story and turns it on its head in a way - the characters are on foot and there's little real development in character from beginning to end. This is a paradoxical book in that very little really happens from beginning to end - two characters come out of the mountains of what used to be the Carolinas, head for the coast, and search for food, shelter and safety. That's pretty much it, and yet it is a compelling read - I found myself wondering, "What is going to happen next?"

This book is pretty darn grim, too. In the post war-apocalypse of North America a father and son trudge through a godforsaken landscape where the sun never breaks through the clouds, nothing grows, no animals exist, and starvation and human predators threaten at every turn. And yet it is a strangely moving book. In some ways it is a meditation on the power of love (familial) in the face of the most extreme predations. There's no real happy ending, but not pure despair either. I'd definitely recommend this book, especially to any students interested in futuristic dystopian, post-apocalyptic novels.