Reviewed by Dave Morrison, VCU Libraries Building Manager
The Road is Cormac McCarthy's latest delve into the human condition. Its penultimate and nightmarish scenario offers a horrific vision of an Earth gone dead from an apocalyptic event far beyond our conception. It is a dark world not to be confused with Mad Max's post-nuclear war celluloid land of fast, fun dune buggies and blue skies. McCarthy's burned out landscape is choked with the ash of an unimaginable and unexplained fiery holocaust. Two survivors, who are known only as the man and the boy, trek through a silent world void of sunlight, food, and hope. Snow falls gray and neither plants nor animals have survived the event. Heading south for what they believe will be a warmer climate, pushing a shopping cart through ankle deep ash that smothers the ground, man and boy evade armies of lost souls who have found it easier to turn to cannibalism for their nourishment. They scavenge whatever they can to survive. They are the "good guys." Their small and worried dialogues over foraged cans of peaches and pork & beans are quaint and loving under the hellish trials they endure daily in such an unnatural world. Readers whose senses were assaulted by McCarthy's 1986 Blood Meridian, a Western gore-tromp through some of contemporary literature's most violent writing, will be just as riveted to this "End of the World" tale. For all its bleakness, hope and love speak volumes throughout this book.
