Genre: Apocalyptic fiction
Key Stage: KS5+ contains mature often unsettling content including scenes of a graphic nature.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007)
Reviewer: Tasmin, Year 12
To begin with, I don’t know if I enjoyed it, but I was certainly fascinated and moved by it.
First of all, this is not a fun book. It is a tragic exploration of a dystopian / post-apocalyptic world, documenting the struggle to move forward in the face of overwhelming hopelessness. It’s not a cautionary tale: it is a straight up survival story centred around father and son, with the importance of life being the central theme. It follows a father and son as they travel to the East Coast in search of safety. They battle many threats, such as humanity at its more depraved and desperate, but the greatest threat is starvation. For me, the important question The Road asks is why does the father choose to go on? Despite the fact that he is dying, that there is barely anyone left, that he and his son are always starving, he cannot bring himself to consider suicide. He cannot bring himself to consider cannibalism. Right up until the very end, when his body gives out and he cannot go any further, he is moving forward in the hope that there is something better out there, and he only ever encourages his son to do the same. This caused me to question: how much strength did that take? How much did he value his life and the life of his son?
What I really liked most, oddly, was the dialogue, and I think it represented exactly what The Road was about. No unnecessary speech, no dialogue tags, not even any quotation marks to indicate that dialogue is taking place. The few sharp words between father and son say much more than the dialogue tags could.
Some other great books like The Road are: The Gunslinger by Stephen King, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, The Postman by David Brin.