The two main characters of this novel, a father and his son, are on the run, hiding from gangs of vicious ‘bloodcult’ cannibals looking to capture, enslave and eat anyone left alive. Everything is burnt, ash-covered, with corpses everywhere. It takes about ten pages to reveal, in patches of bleak discovery for the reader, that the landscape that the two characters of this novel inhabit is a post-apocalyptic one. The result is as beautiful as it is painful. McCarthy goes as far as it is possible to go in literature – stripping the characters’ world bare until there’s nothing left but metaphor. There is possibly enlightenment, but the tiny candle of hope the book holds out is dim indeed. The Road is neither fun-loving, nor beatnik. The title suggests some kind of Kerouacian journey to fun-loving beatnik enlightenment, but nothing could be further from the truth. The two characters who populate the story are at the very end of the road. It goes to the very edge of the precipice: death, destruction, annihilation. It’s probably fair to call The Road a perfect novel. The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.
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