Everyone and their grandmother has been on my ass to read this book since it came out in 2006 and won pretty much every award for writing that exists, including the Pulitzer Prize. And it’s not that I didn’t want to read it, I did; but I was waiting until I really felt like it. Partly because I loved No Country For Old Men, and by all acounts this is McCarthy’s masterpiece, and after I read it I would never be able to read it for the first time again; also because it looked depressing as hell. And it is, but it’s also transcendently beautiful. How the hell does he do that?
Anyway, when Natasha wrote about it for HeyBeUs, I figured it was time. Especially because she said, and I quote:
That motherfucker Cormac knows what the abyss is and he will straight up fist-fuck you with it.
The Road takes place several years after some calamity has befallen the planet. It’s never fully explained, probably because the protagonists themselves don’t really know what happened. We don’t even know if was a natural or man-made disaster. Whatever it was left the earth scorched and dead. There are no animals, not even birds or fish, and plants from trees to grass have withered. The only things moving are the ash that covers everything, and a handful of survivors.
Two of them, a man and his son, are our heros. They have no names, they are just the man and the boy. They’re traveling to the coast, although they have no real reason to think anything awaits them there. In this world you have to keep moving, to scavenge food and to avoid roving cannibals (as in that other great entry in the apocalyptic canon, Lucifer’s Hammer).
I’m not sure how this novel is going to translate to film, unless they change a lot–the fact that Charlize Theron is cast as the wife tells me they have, because I don’t think you’d cast a fairly big-name Oscar winner for a part that (in the book) only had a couple of scenes. But Viggo Mortenson is perfect to play the man, and I adore him, so I’ll be there opening week. Plus, Garret Dillahunt (who was also in the movie of No Country For Old Men), Robert Duvall, and Guy Pearce? Fuck yeah.
