What to say about The Road? What to say about a book that touched its every reader that hasn't been iterated and reiterated a hundred times before, in a thousand different ways?
Like so many literary sorts, genre fans familiar with apocalyptic fiction as like as regular old souls who like a good tale to take to bed with them, Cormac McCarthy's landmark last novel left me speechless, breathless, hopeless. A short, sharp shock of a story, The Road told of a man and a boy clinging to one another at the end of the world. With every other sliver of hope lost to them, they go South, towards the sea; towards nowhere in particular and everything, all at once.
The man and the boy, on the road. McCarthy never names them, denies them, in fact, their identities in every sense but that which they derive from one another. They come across all manner of horrors left behind by the unnamed calamity that has made a hollow ruin of our Earth. Cannibals, thieves and animals are the least of it: mostly, the man and the boy encounter the eternal struggle for survival that life has become in the form of hunger. If they have any hope of reaching the end of the endless road, they must, of course, eat, except that untold years have passed since the world ended. There is little food left for them to scavenge.
Counter-intuitively, perhaps, for all the misery and isolation of McCarthy's Pulitzer prizewinner, it was, in the end, an uplifting sort of story. For all the cruel tragedy within its pages, The Road had a tender heart; for all its harsh reality, McCarthy wrote his simple, striking narrative with a soft touch.