The Road by Cormac McCarthy

*Starting today, this will be a daily blog! I've been writing reviews over the last year, so I'm going to use the ones I have stored up until I catch up with my more current reviews.*

"The nights were blinding cold and the casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it."



"...creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.



I neither buy nor read collections of poetry anymore. I can count the poems I know by heart, at least the non-limerick ones, on a single hand. I'm not a huge fan of poetry anymore, and i truly see much of it as overblown--a good thing taken to a ridiculously inflated extreme. This book isn't poetry, but it's also not pure narrative. It's somewhere in the grey between, and I enjoyed every single page of it.
McCarthy had me on the 14th line when I read "granatic beast." No, I didn't need to be told this was a reference to stone. Its use here, early in the work, deliberate, familiar yet uncommon, communicated to me exactly what this book would be about, and more importantly how it would be told, and I couldn't wait to ingest it. The cotemplated and intentional use of this word in this place told me of texture and color and temperature, and its context told me of fear, uuncetainty, cruelty, and the close specter of menance. I was hooked before the first page was done.



I enjoyed this book's writing style immensely, its story simple and told in a manner that came to me clearly,, instantly creating depth with a minimum of prose. words like "envacumming," and phrases like "isocline of death" were absolutely brilliant--i bite my hand melodramatically wishing I'd written them. This highly evocative austerity was mirrored in the father's and the son's conversations, in which so little was said, but in which I was seeing absolutely clearly the cant of a head, a look in the eyes, the faintest curl of a smile.



And the wonderfully lyrical story unfolded. No, I didn't need quotation marks or crucial apostrophes. There was never any question of what was happening, who was saying what or where the story was headed. Honestly, do they care about proper punctuation in the wasteland? I didn't miss a thing, and the modestly different narrative presentation didn't faze me in the least. In fact, it reminded me instantly of E. E. Cummings. Ah, reluctantly back to poetry. Later on when the pair made it to the sea, and the prose touched on "shuttling," instantly T. S. Eliot's classic came to mind.



I very much enjoyed the father, an abject lesson in survival and just what it takes. he not only was educated, but also remembered it and knew how and when to apply it. He was inventive, attentive and observant, and deliberately learned from every experience. He anticipated, adapted and showed the courage to take immediate action, having thought through the consequences beforehand. He was no MacGyver, but from th opening minutes of the crisis he knew what was at hand; his survival, and his son's was due to his seriousness and intelligence and his application of them.



This book is not about the end of the world. It's not about nuclear winter, man's inevitable murder of the planet, the inherent barbarity of man, none of that. This book is about the only thing that matters, a parent's love for a child, and what at the absolutely basic level of survival you can and cannot do for those whom you treasure most, what you will go through and what you must decide upon for them to have all they need and deserve.



Bottom line: this is not a cheery, happy, frothy and light read. It is cold and hard and painful. But there is joy in it. be estatic it is only a story, that tonight you sleep ina bed in a house with food, water, and your dog on the hearth. be aware of and happy that you are reading this expertly rendered, magnificently crafted work of highly evocative prose, and look forward to the next one, whatever the subject.