Review: The Road
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
everyone raves about this book by cormac mccarthy on reddit, so i decided to pick it up. i was really really thinking it was going to be something absolutely horrible to try to get into with a beyond pretentious sentence structure and winding, annoying paragraphs that never end.
boy, was i wrong.
at first i was a little scared, because while the sentences are simple and paragraphs short, mccarthy has a distinct way of writing that i was afraid was going to be pretentiousness defined. but i got so sucked in, it doesn’t matter if it is pretentious.
it’s a post-apocalyptic story about a father and his son walking their way to the east coast and the trials they run into along the way.
there are no quotation marks. there are deliberately missing apostrophes. the sentences are brief and fragmented at times. grammatically, mccarthy has written a nightmare.
in terms of plot and style? top notch. i recommend this 100%.
but i have a rant – not about this particular book, but about post-apocalyptic/dustopian world books in general.
i realize that stories need conflict, but it seems that these books always end in a horrible way. people don’t know what they’re doing; most of them have turned evil and are keeping others as slaves and/or food; all bicycles have somehow disappeared; and there is no food anywhere for anyone.
people lived without electricity and modern-day conveniences for a lot longer than with, and they managed to live in relative harmony (at least relative enough to get us where we are today). people are doing this TODAY.
somehow i’m to believe that people can’t figure out how to grow their own food, raise their own animals, dig their own wells – basically go little house on the prairie – once electricity has left the building? i’m not sure i buy it.
people are resourceful, strong-willed, and a lot more willing to learn than i think others realize. there will be some bad apples, but i think the bad apples will be put down a lot sooner than the bad apples would bring fire and brimstone down upon the average nice people of the earth.
there are many people living off the grid as it is; i don’t think it’s impossible to believe people would figure out how to survive without resorting to these awful strategies you read in books.