The Road is a haunting, haggard tale that can leave a reader feeling hunted for days after the journey.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a journey through a ravaged land where the reader is in no danger of becoming entangled in a dense, word-filled bush and verbose, overgrown crops that need a bushknife to hack through.

Minimalism and an economy of words drag the reader kicking and screaming through this ultimate apocalyptic survivors tale. Ultimate because it could so easily come true. No real imagination necessary to download this nightmare in the early hours of a sleepless morning.

The blurb is curiously uninformative, “A father and his son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food – and each other.”

McCarthy does not build plots, he weaves tales endlessly using only words. I was warned about this book by an English Literature grad student from Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. She simply said that I wouldn’t be able to put it down and when I stumbled upon it on the backpackers communal shelf I snapped it up forthwith.

She was right about not being able to toss it aside, even when I had to squint through matchsticks. This book stands as a challenge to anybody who does not enjoy reading. Defy this book and you might as well defy life, the universe and everything. It doesn’t get more real, visceral and tactile than this.

A sample follows that I throw out as bait, knowing I won’t lack for plenty of catches.

“In the morning they came out of the ravine and took to the road again. He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a travelling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried away by wolves.”

The idle and inane, kindergarten sqabble that goes on around the planet about global warming is brought into bold, believable relief against a background of stark, lifeless skylines that do nothing but highlight what used to be there.

The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Picador
2006