~ the road

I haven’t often cried finishing a novel. It has happened, but I can’t recall the particular titles… Love in The Time of Cholera, possibly. Perhaps after One Hundred Years of Solitude [Gabriel G Marquez] … J G Ballard’s The Kindness of Women …

But last night I finished off The Road by Cormac McCarthy. For brute emotional force it trumps everything - at least everything I can bring to mind. It’s the long nightmare from which you are unable to wake, a frozen, pared-down hell in which nothing remains - save for a few desperate humans and their various brands of humanity. The crumbling black bones of Nature. Some scavenged goods. A few improvised tools and a world of wet ash. What these survivors do, in order to persist, ahead of the inevitable void, becomes a flat expressionless judgment of humankind.

I’m sure a tremendous amount has been written about The Road. I won’t go on. I’ll just say that I think, for this time, for the current version of the human race , it’s the best book I’ve read - and that the final couple of paragraphs come down on you with the weight of every single word prior.

(I wonder if the movie will hold true? It’s in post-production, directed by John Hillcoat, [The Proposition, Ghosts of The Civil Dead and, incidentally, the clip for The Finer Things by Beargarden]. Viggo Mortensen plays The Father, of which I’m glad.)