Book 3: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road is one of those powerful books that leaves you thinking about humanity and your place in humanity. Good Guys and Bad Guys...what makes one good what makes one bad and given the situation which side would you choose? The Road takes place in a post apocalyptic world. There are no more cities no more towns just ash and the ruins of modern highways. One of the things that makes this book so powerful to me is that McCarty never fully explains how exactly the world cam to its demise. It left the reader room to wonder and worry what happened could it happen to use. So many of these recent Armageddon types of movies give such wordy explanations as to why the world is going to end that gives you license, to deny the validity of it ever happening to us. The Road offers to comforts how it ended and how it could have been prevented (no green messages) the world is gone and that's it.


The story is that of a man and his son trudging along the road trying to survive anyway they can. There names are never given they are referred to as the man and the boy. It is so compelling, they are all each other has, they only reason they have not given up is each other. They see horrors that are unspeakable. Death and destruction are commonplace to them. All along the road there are melted and charred remains of people and as horrible as they find it they have leaned to live it, it is there reality now, it has been the boys only reality. The other glimpses of people in this new world are horrible. Cannibals who scour the country side searching for people to kill and eat. They happen upon a house, a commune of sorts, where the cannibals have put the other humans in a cellar like hams in a smokehouse. They see a group of people roasting a headless and gutted infant (that scene was tough for me I almost had to stop reading).

Yet through all this the boy remains good, he wants to help others, even though they are starving to death he would give what little they have to someone else. Constantly worried about other people he is a beacon of light in a world that has gone black and he is his fathers only reason to live. They come upon a store of food underground (like a bunker you always hear crazy people building with canned food, blankets, batteries, shoes, everything they need (why they just do not say there still escapes me) and the first thing the boy wants to do is thank the people who died for giving them what they have. There really is no concept of God in this book the man has lost his faith and it leaves you to ask yourself  in a world like that wouldn't you?

In the end the road is long the going is tough and the man dies (he has been coughing blood for a long time and there is no medicine) The boy finds a family to go on with who have a little boy (they have been following them for a while he keeps seeing the little boy throughout the novel and they man does not believe him) Though the book is desolate and it seems there is no recovering from a world that is gone through this boy you think maybe the world can regain itself.