"The Road" is unlike any novel I have ever read.
Hell, the punctuation - or lack thereof - alone makes it most unique.
But there is more.
A nameless father and son team as main-characters known only as "the man" and "the boy". A journey down a road in a post-apopolyptic world that exists for an unknown/unnamed reason leaving these two pushing a cart with scavenged supplies while hiding from man-eaters and the elements of nature.
Not really something I can say I have read about.
And I liked it. A lot.
I am not sure why exactly. But I did.
Yes it is depressing and bleak, but I found myself enthralled in their journey once I decided to simply sit down and finish the book.
There are sentences I found simply beautiful, darn near poetic.
"It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single-gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom."
There were also those I had to read several times, sometimes still not grasping their full breadth of meaning and storytelling.
"At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment. He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt."
In fact, I think I can see myself reading it again one of these days.
After I give Mr. McCarthy's other works a shot, courtesy of the Davidson Public Library.
Oh ya, they just made a movie about it too. Dunno if it is any good though.
