The Road

The Road

The Road is a really immersive book that describes the journey of a father and its son on a post-apocalyptic world.

What happened in this world isn’t explained at any moment, but suffice to say that it’s really gray, full of ash and liveless.

Corman McCarthy does a really good job on creating detailed (but not that much) descriptions, which helps to transport the reader to the world he’s writing about.

One peculiarity of his writing is that he doesn’t add quotation marks when the characters are speaking. The edition of the book that I read added indentation on the characters’ dialogues, but I don’t know if it’s something that’s present in all editions. But anyway, the absence of quotation marks didn’t bother me that much. Maybe because the book that I read before this one was The Old Man And The Sea, which presents dialogues along with the rest of the text with no distinction at all.

About the story itself, it intercalates peaceful moments of father and son relationship with lots of tense survival incidents that they have to endure to thrive in the destroyed world that they live.

However, even on the peaceful moments, the dialogues between the father and the son are short, without many flourishes. I dare to say that they are really too succinct, for a father and son relationship. But, in a very tense world, where the end of your life may be on the next corner, the conversations are reduced to the bare necessary and all the energies are focused on trying to survive.

Despite all that, what really matters in the end is that the father and the son are “carrying the fire”, as the characters say many times, what I interpret as an analogy to keep believing, keep thriving. And that’s what matters, after all.

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”