A stark meditation on the futility of life when all you know and love has been destroyed. A fascinating trek through a bleak, post apocalyptic landscape. The forging of a bond between father and son as they cling on to the last vestiges of hope in a desolate world.
Well..I'd like to say Cormac McCarthy's ponderous, plodding and preciously pretentious The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and bedecked with critical plaudits is all of the above.
I'd like to say it made me ponder on the nature of the world today and how frighteningly close I think we are to the brink of the sort of anihilation depicted in this slim 287 page book that nevertheless took me forever to finish, on account of the fact that eyelids drooping with boredom-induced sleep don't make for fast reading.
Mine was the minority opinion in our monthly Book Club Meet though as most of the other members seemed to have liked it and felt it warranted serious analysis. It scared some, moved others and terrified the rest. The level of analysis and discussion this turgid tale of a father and son trek through a ravaged world, heading south to some imagined utopia while dodging cannibalistic scavengers and staving off hunger, seemed to have engendered in my fellow bookies, is eye-popping to say the least.
This pointless tale is unevenly written, whipping back and forth from evocative descriptions of vast wastelands to dreary dialogues coasting by on the gimmicky conceit of not having quotation marks. For a book that starts nowhere and gets nowhere fast, it ends on a false note of hope that seems to have been tacked on at the last minute.
The disconnect between what I, a reader expected and what this book delivered is a yawning chasm I don' t expect to bridge in this lifetime.
Get off this Road..it ain't goin' nowhere.
