Insider Rowing

I picked this one up at the airport on the way back from Boston and had it finished by the time I got back home. Wow, what an amazing read. The story takes place several years after some kind of apocalypse has ravaged the Earth and shows humanity in it’s dying hour. The exact apocalypse is never disclosed, but we do know that fires have burned everything on the planet, ash is perpetual and inescapable, and virtually every living thing (plants, animals, etc) is gone except for a handful of humans. Nuclear War? Meteors? Unknown. The protagonists are an unnamed father and son who are traveling to the coast and attempting to reach some kind of safety, away from marauding groups of cannibals. Food and shelter are absolute rarities and the struggle against starvation is ever present. Their existence is imperiled every minute of every day. The boy, whose age is unknown but can be guessed at around 10, was born after the apocalypse and you get the sense he may be the last good thing Earth. Their situation is so desperate that the father many times considers suicide for the both of them. You very much pull for the two, because they are the last “good guys,” because you can sense the profound love the father has for the son, and the reader gets emotionally involved from the first page.

The language of the story is austere, without flowery descriptions, but the rhythm is lyrical, and the author picks from a remarkable vocabulary that suggests a religious tone. There are many words sprinkled throughout the narrative that I had to look up, or remind myself to add to my own vocabulary. McCarthy, for example, uses the word patterans, in this passage:

They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. The were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans.

The protagonists rarely spend a lot of time pontificating or intellectualizing about their situation and you get the feeling that they are so deep into hell that thoughtfulness is a luxury they disposed of a long time ago.

McCarthy is also the author of No Country for Old Men and the Border Trilogy. He also wrote Blood Meridian, a mythic western that uses similar language with an even more remarkable vocabulary. Some of the other reviews out there suggest that The Road is the pinnacle of McCarthy’s work.

I was moved by this story and it’s easily one of the best works of fiction I’ve ever read. I give it my highest recommendation.