Review

The Road paints a bleak picture of a post-apocalyptic world.  The book spends a lot of time describing the scenery around the characters.  The water is gray and laden with dust, the trees are all dead and stripped of leaves, and the sun is obscured by a never ending cloud of ash, leaving the world in perpetual twilight. It even snows ash.  The two main characters are the Man and the Boy.  The man was alive before the world was devastated, the boy was born after.  They live day to day by scavenging in peoples abandoned houses, searching for tins of food.  They have to avoid anyone else they see, as anyone (excluding them) who had survived this long had resorted to cannibalism and banditry.  The story follows their journey east across the ruins of America; their only goal to reach the coast.  There is never a concrete reason for their walk; it is left open for interpretation.  The writing is very idiomatic; many forms of punctuation aren’t used, like quotation marks.  It is arranged into single paragraph scenes; almost like vignettes. They often end in philosophical musings or the father and son reassuring each other that it would be okay.

The characters often talk about how they are “carrying the flame”, arc words that are shared with another of McCarthy’s novels, No Country for Old Men.  The story can be very depressing; it is the only post-apocalyptic story I know of that has the raw cojones to have humanity outright dying out.  The book makes it very clear the biosphere is dead and mankind will die out within a few years. The main characters subside on canned food scavenged from ruins. Most, if not all, remaining people are cannibals, roaming the roads in search of a meal.  One part of the story involves the two finding a group of cannibals that hack limbs off of people they have captured, but keeping them alive for future meals.

If that sounds good to you, enjoy the book.  I can't tell you if you will like it or not; I'm too busy not being a wizard to do that.