Just Finished: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I am just a simple reader. I don't have the beautiful words to describe a book, and I don't seem to be a sophisticated reader. I can't analyze the prose, compare it to any other American author, delve into the language like so many of the reviews I read at Goodreads. When I read, I either like the book or I don't. And every now and then there are books which I can't sort out in my neat piles of liking or disliking. This is one of these.

There is much to dislike about the book, I think. For starters, it is a bleak topic: the survival of a few in an post-apocalyptic world. The dialogue is scarce, simple and repetitive, almost mundane. Except that sometimes in those mundane words there are pearls hidden. The story is vague. We never now what really happened, how they survived, where are they headed to,what are their plans. Heck! We don't ever know even their names!The main characters are simply referred throughout the story as the man and they boy. It drove me crazy at times! I wanted details. I wanted to know. I wanted to get more glimpses at their pre-disaster lives. Who were they before? How come the man knew so much about survival? And there were other questions in my mind: How long have they lived like this? How old was the boy?

I have the hunch that the vagueness was on purpose. I think the author was tapping into some kind of universality. Fears are universal. Relationships are universal.Death is present to us all, disasters can happen and how we react and what kind of person will they make us, is a question that we all could face. In the book the survivors were of two kinds, the "good guys" or the "bad guys". The man and the boy belonged to the "good guys". I think the boy is a prototype of all that is innocent and good, the goodness that we struggle to hold on to when corruption is all around us. He has the black and white way of children, in whose views the world is easily classified and things fall into neat categories. You are either good or bad, coward or brave. He was my favorite character in the book. I picture him like my son N. He had that same ability to think and question, to take things in and when you least expect it, come out with some profound observation. The boy, in my view, kept the man being a man of integrity and honesty. He kept him from sinking into that sub-human state that so many of the survivors have fallen into.

I was touched by their relationship. The man loved his son. The son loved his father. Why was the boy good? I think he was father because the father managed to do, in more than bleak circumstances, what fathers do:direct, guide and instill morals in his son. He managed to nurture in the boy that goodness that comes from the imprint of the Creator.

This book is about love, the love between father and son. It is also a book about hope in the midst of despair; goodness in the midst of evil; courage in the midst of constant fear. It is the triumph of the human spirit in the midst of death.