THE ROAD
By Cormac McCarthy
Picador. 256 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 0 330 468 466
I haven’t read anything like this book for years.
Although popular and now made into a film, it had completely passed me by, perhaps because of my taste for history, subtlety and domesticity; The Road is as far removed from that as can possibly be. It is a dystopian view of a post-holocaust world, raw and gut-wrenching, written in striking prose.
In the 1980s, the Cold War meant that earnest teenagers read about nuclear destruction. Here, the landscape is the same, but the writing is definitely grown-up. We have a simple scenario: in an ironic play on the road movie genre, a father and son are making their way through burnt -out America to the coast, their few belongings in a supermarket trolley. We never learn their names and neither do we find out what has happened to bring about such environmental and social devastation. Food has all but disappeared and the land is depopulated, apart from bands of roving soldiers and desperate individuals seeking to survive by cannibalism. Every day is a terrifying battle against despair and death in this inversion of the American dream.
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