The Road: Review

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
Published by Vintage
Published in 2008 (reprint edition)
ISBN: 0307455297


This book was given to me by my dear husband and I am reviewing it of my own accord. 


What does the end of the world look like? When you let your thoughts wander into the darkest recesses of your imagination, do you ever wonder what will become of this planet? Who will survive and how? Would you fight until the end or quietly end it all? 


Previously, post-apocalyptic literature has depicted a world brought to its knees by nuclear war but more recent offerings of this genre have seen the more recent concerns of environmental demise brought to the fore.* The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a stunning example of this recent shift of our collective fears. It follows the story of a man and his son as they follow a road heading south in a post-apocalyptic America. Very little is offered by way of explanation as to exactly what has happened to the world, but the reader soon learns that civilization as we all know it now is gone, mobs roam the wilderness raping and pillaging other survivors and each day is a struggle against the cold and starvation. 


Although the characters of the father and child have no names and their dialogue is sparse, the warmth of their relationship is a stark contrast to the relentless nature of their existence. The father's only concern is for the boy's safety and sees him as a beacon of hope - "If he is not the word of God then God never spoke" - that motivates him to carry on, one foot in front of the other through what can only be described as a mind-numbingly depressive landscape. He teaches the boy that they are the "good guys" who are "carrying the fire" although at times his actions must necessarily err on the side of survival rather than ethics. The character of the boy is truly a wonder. He surely must be traumatized beyond all reason yet his innocence and wish to help others remains - he doesn't mind going without food so they might share their limited food with others.


The imagery in this novel is stunning. The description of the woods, the abandoned and looted houses and worst of all, the marauding mobs was so vivid and petrifying that a few days after finishing the novel I can close my eyes and still see it. The horror is burned onto your mind's eye. The sheer desolation and inconceivable nothingness (cows was extinct! Cows!!) is a sharp reminder to all of us of what may happen if we don't care more for our planet. 

Basically, this novel is just so overwhelming and so utterly absorbing that words cannot do it justice. It is something you simply have to read and experience for yourself. I spent 48 hours with this book basically glued to my hand experiencing a full range of emotions from despair to terror to hope to grief. The recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black award for fiction, this is a brilliant piece of contemporary literature that will, in my opinion, become a classic. That is, if the planet lasts long enough. 


*An article on the Guardian books blog looks at this recent trend in more detail here. 

Where do you draw the line?

Earlier this year I read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. It was recommended to me by a good friend who had just finished reading it and loved it and sure enough, I also really enjoyed it. Hmm. Maybe "enjoyed" is the wrong word. It's hard to 'enjoy' the unblinking account of how two society drop-outs come to brutally murder a decent and community minded family of four... Let's just say I was gripped by it. I could not put it down nor could I read anything else until I knew how it all ended.

What made it such a compelling read? Partially, of course, Capote's writing keeps the reader involved but I think the main driving force behind this book is the fact that it is real. This happened - the facts are all real (although there is some controversy about the accuracy of Capote's reporting on some details). Capote read about these killings in the paper and immediately packed up his suitcase and went out to Holcomb, West Kansas to cover this story. This Guardian Books article looks at this case which happened fifty years ago this month - it's a cracking read, so I recommend you check it out.

Truman Capote

Image credit: Here

The article got me thinking though. It mentions that although some townspeople were happy with the book and its epic success (millions of copies sold and four movies made), there were plenty that were not. As a result of the popularity of the book and it's movie spinoffs, there has been and will undoubtedly continue to be a steady stream of people from all over the world coming through to see the place where it all happened. Bobby (now Bob) Rupp, the then-sixteen year old sweetheart of Nancy Clutter, now 66 year old father of four, grandfather of eight, stated his displeasure with the books and movies, which incidentally he has never read nor watched and never will, as he felt that this attention has made people only focus on the fact of the Clutters' bloody demise rather than on what they achieved as people during their lives.

This and the ethically thorny issue of profiting from re-telling someone else's misery are commonly raised when literature deals with tragedy and disaster. Even though I haven't even started writing it yet, I have come across this in my thesis about post 9/11 literature. Some people have reacted angrily to those who wish to portray the events of that day through any media - be it literature, in films, through photography... And this is understandable. For those suffering the loss of someone, their grief is a very personal experience and any intrusion into the sacred space of the memory of their loved one be it direct or indirect is intolerable. However, for events such as 9/11, there is another grief at work: public grief. This grief is predicated on not personal loss but societal loss, the collective trauma of seeing, time and time again, from various angles the planes flying into the towers and their subsequent collapse, knowing we were watching people lose their lives. There's also the grief for the loss of a sense of security and loss of stability.

Image credit: photographer unknown

To work through a collective trauma it seems that representations of the event are necessary, but that doesn't mean that those who feel intruded upon are likely to be any more understanding. It seems to me to be a necessary evil, that these events must be memorialised and entrenched into our history through the written word and film. Because, as painful as it is that these things happened and though we may wish we could, we cannot and should not forget them.

I have to wonder about In Cold Blood, though. Was it necessary to have this gruesome murder written so definitively into America's history?

What are your thoughts on this? What do you think of representations of human tragedy and disaster? Historically and socially necessary or ethically and morally questionable?

Books to movies.... always bad?

"Hollywood, in particular, seems to be like an exocet missile to hone in on whatever was good in a novel and remove it, destroy it and then proceed from there."

So said Robert Harris who is the author of many books (most recently Lustrum) on BBC Radio Five Live's Book Reviews with Simon Mayo.* From what I could gather, it sounded a lot like he'd had some very bad experiences of people adapting his work for the big screen - as have many other authors. Audrey Niffenegger, author of one of my all-time favourite books The Time Traveller's Wife was also on the same programme. She commented that she had been advised to completely let go of all artistic control when TTTW was adapted and as a result hadn't even been to see the finished result. This was particularly because the movie is not her book and you can't unsee what you have already seen - the memory of the movie will henceforth always taint her experience of the book.

It's for this very reason that I haven't gone to see TTTW in the movies - I loved this book and for me it lives in my memory as a place I can revisit when I next read the book (and I know I will) and I just don't want anyone else's idea of what the book looks like getting mixed up in all of that. Reading a book, after all, is a very personal experience. The settings of the books, the voices of the characters, the atmosphere of the places - you and the author have created that together just for your enjoyment. Nobody else ever sees or experiences the novel in exactly the same way, which is one of the great joys of literature. If you go to the movies with a friend, however, you know that they have seen exactly the same thing that you have seen.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not beating up on movies - I'm actually a great fan of them and very much enjoy watching a good film. It's just that they are two completely different mediums and I fear that something is always lost when the two worlds collide. There has only been one time that I have ever watched a movie adaptation of a book and not been disappointed by it and that was Peter Jackson's interpretation of Lord of the Rings. But even then - his vision of Mordor, whilst fantastically dark and horrifying, was not the same as my vision of Mordor. And so, a little something is lost - now I can only ever see Jackson's Mordor when I think of this novel.

Ultimately I'm not here to wax lyrical about whether the page is mightier than the silver screen. The choice here is not black and white and one is not better than the other, in my opinion. I just personally believe that if you really enjoyed a book and have a strong personal connection to it, it is wise to think twice about watching the movie adaptation of it.

What do you think? Have you ever seen a movie adaptation that ruined your enjoyment of a book? Or, have you ever seen an adaptation that improved a book? I'm keen to hear your thoughts!

* This quote was taken from the podcast released on 15th October 2009. Podcast is available through iTunes or the BBC World Service website.