The Road by Cormac McCarthy

[2008-06-04]

I am getting worse and worse at keeping these things up to date. At least I’m still reading, though. Anyways, today I finished this book.

It was a pretty interesting novel. The basic premise is that the world has almost ended (for some unknown reason). Everything is ashy and looks as if life has degenerated into basic survival. The book follows a father and a son who are traveling south (ostensibly to a better place). Their journey consists of the highs (finding a wonderful storm cellar filled with canned goods and all kinds of provisions) to the lows (stumbling into a house with a basement full of imprisoned people who are being cannibalized) to the even lower (coming upon a group of wanderers who left the campsite in a hurry and left a baby that was being boiled).

Darkness surrounds life, and nobody knows what the next day will hold. In fact, they don’t even know what the next hour will hold.

This is a rather dark book. Is it true that you can best see the light when darkness is all around? Perhaps. In the case of The Road, the physical darkness is only further enhanced by the moral darkness. But then again, all of that allows the reader to see the good in the seemingly last good people on earth.