Book Review - The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This book had me waking my flatmate as I screamed in my sleep. Do not be put off such nocturnal trauma; this is a rewarding and vital book. The father and son at its centre are “pilgrims” and “mendicant friars” in the “cold glaucoma” of a sunless, wasted America. Scavenging the hopefully abandoned houses and stores of a more abundant age, decent shoes are their first priority after food. Two bullets, one apiece for father and son, are their material defence against the gangs of roadreapers who would rape the son and eat them both. Language itself is not immune to this destruction, “the names of things slowly following those things into oblivion”. Yet, however spare the language McCarthy uses to imagine the absence of God and words, his is of our abundant age. Through it he has created a tale whose fearful beauty offers a glimmering hope and reminds us that our civilization, any civilization, is as wafer thin as a “host” and as fleeting as words.