Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. For those of you not in the know, Cormac McCarthy is well-respected writer. He came up with No Country For Old Men. And The Road will become a film soon enough. Let's hope it actually is the "Major Film" that the front cover of my copy of the book claimed it would be. 

Make no mistake about it, it is good book. I enjoyed The Road - if you can enjoy a book that is so unrelentingly grim. Set after some sort of global calamity*, The Road is about a father and son making their way across a devastated America. They meet and encounter nightmarish people and circumstances. They see cannibals and their cellars full of human fodder. They see murderers, rapists, monsters; and struggle not to become monsters themselves. Their few moments of joy are the result of finding somewhere safe to lay their heads, or somewhere containing something to fill their empty bellies. Cosy catastrophe this isn't. Day to day, their only objective is to stay alive.

Yet, I'd struggle to call The Road a great novel. It is well written, occasionally poetic, and often breath-taking. But it isn't original in any way. I guess for many of those who have praised this novel to the heavens, it is genuinely the first of its kind. The problem is, it isn't original on any level for someone with a passing knowledge of sci-fi/horror.

The post-apocalyptic novel has been around for eons, and in my opinion, there are far more satisfactory examples out there than The Road. There is The Stand - Stephen King's classic novel of an epidemic, followed by a journey across a ravaged America. Then there's a lot of the early work of J G Ballard - in particular his magnificent The Drowned World. And as bleak as The Road is, it still doesn't manage the gut punch of John Christopher's The Death of Grass, which sees both society and the individual characters in the novel collapse altogether and become something far more malign. 

And then you had The Day of the Triffids - a book that is very similar to the The Road, in that it details a journey across a ravaged land before the surviving protagonist(s) find something approaching a safe haven. In fact, The Day of the Triffids arguably offers more than The Road, since it details how the end of everything happened. 

The Road is well worth a read, and is a good book in its own right. However it isn't the best of a number of novels in a compelling genre. By all means read it, but also check out the other books mentioned in this post. Because they are as strong as - if not better than - The Road.

*I've read that this is the first great catastrophe novel of the global warming generation. However, don't worry if you are like me and skeptical that the end of days will actually be down to us not recycling enough. The causes of the calamity are open-ended, and it could just as easily be a nuclear war.