In a burned out America a father and his young son, struggle to make their way south and the coast, supposedly, to safety. They have no idea what, if anything, awaits them there. The entire plot is bound up in this march along the road, seeking out a place of refuge from the various threats. The landscape is destroyed, nothing moves save the ash on the wind and cruel, lawless men with only a pistol for protection. They must simply keep walking.

They travel through a wasteland in a state of near starvation without so much as a hint of true hope in the future but it's hope that keeps them moving forward. The Man maintains hope for his son, repetitively telling him that they are the “good guys” and that they are “carrying the fire.” It’s clear that the Man has lost hope in the world, he is haunted by memories of the past but, that’s not something he’s willing to share with his son, as a father myself this is an easy thing to imagine.

"You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget"

The Man uses the phrase “carrying the fire” as another way of ensuring his son that they have a purpose in life and that they aren’t suffering for no reason. They have to carry hope, kindness, and morality with them through their lives because others aren’t. The “fire” of human goodness is at stake. The Man sees it when he looks at his son in a way I believe will resonate with readers everywhere.

The Boy is presented as a figure of hope throughout the novel, The Boy is kind and helpful to a fault. When the two meet an old traveller named Eli, the Boy, despite The Man’s attempts to stop him, gives him food from their supplies. Eli is without gratitude for this incredibly selfless act, but The Boy does it anyway. The Boy becomes a symbol of what humanity used to be and Its at moments like this that makes it clear why The Man is willing to do anything to ensure that his son survives.

"Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden."

The book is filled with the torments of a post-apocalyptic world but, it’s also filled with a great deal of love. It's love that keeps The Man and The Boy bound to one another.

This is a book that I'm struggling to rate. On one hand I felt that is was overly long and in need of some serious editing. The Man and the Boy are on the verge of starvation just before stumbling on a hidden cache of food a few times too many and they have too many meetings with 'the bad guys' than I felt was strictly necessary. But I also admire the author's writing style and feel that it conveys a very powerful and moving message. I believe that readers will relate to the Man's will to survive against the odds for as long as possible so as to ensure that his son has a future.

"Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave." ( )

This got me as someone who has a massively close relationship with their father. I genuinely felt on edge, like I was living in the times of the end of the world. It is visual and vivid and horrific and raw. ( )

I love an American road trip book - not sure if it is a genre, maybe as a quest or escapism with a bit of soul searching involved. The point is often to 'find' yourself or to find the 'real' America whilst on the open road or in historical fiction on the wagon train or the train itself. It is all part of the Great American Dream but this book is the American nightmare.

A man and boy are on the road walking after some catastrophic natural phenomena. The sky is grey and clouded and the land is covered in grey ash. There are earthquakes and in the distance the lights of things burning. We know it is bad because the boy and man are on the constant search for food and water, living a life where there is no way of feeding yourself other than what you can take from others and we know this can't last forever. Food will run out. Walking alongside them is death - both theirs and others. If other people are met, they can't be sure they won't be raped or eaten.

During this journey the relationship between the father and son, neither is ever named, is shown to be close and loving with the boy taking on the role of a conscience for the man - we are the good guys, aren't we? Or pointing out when people are scared or hungry. There are glimmers of hope in this relationship as they strive to retain their humanity in a world where they can never unsee what they have seen. 'Carrying the fire' is a shorthand way of saying that they have purpose and are good.

Just as they seem to be starving, food is found in abandonned houses and cellars as are blankets and fire wood. At one point they come across a bunker fully equipped to live a length of time hidden and this is a sign that things are going to get worse. The boy starts to inisist that his father also has some of whatever he has including his last ever can of coca cola. Such symbolism. As we move through the book the boy starts to understand that he is the future and the inevitability of his father's death - the only thing we can be certain of. But there is also the death of language. If we can't see birds or colours how will we remember the names of them. And once we lose language, we start to lose the ability to think because we think in words.

Towards the end the father calls the boy 'Papa' - the ramblings of a fevered man or the change-over of roles because this is what the man has been training the boy to do for the whole journey.

The voice of a loving father is maintained throughout the book until the end - survival is all. ( )

If I’d read Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road earlier in life, I’m sure the experience would have been affecting. But the story was particularly harrowing to read now, as the father of a young son.

The Road features an unnamed man and boy traversing an “ashen scabland” in the aftermath of some unspecified cataclysm. It might have been an asteroid strike or a nuclear exchange; McCarthy only hints at the trigger. What matters is that ash is everywhere, veiling the sun and cooling the globe. And in this grim vision of the future, humanity has plunged into a moral winter as well as a physical one.

Robbed of its ability to grow crops, civilization crumbled fast and hard, leaving “murder … everywhere upon the land, the world … largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.” In the countryside, bloodcults set “balefires on distant ridges” and harness slaves to wagons trailed by “catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars.”

Survivors like the man and the boy subsist by scavenging, too. It’s not easy. Obvious sources of canned goods—a store, a pantry—have already been picked over, rifled for every scrap of nonperishable nutrition. But the man is crafty enough to sniff out hidden morsels, and on those rare occasions when he and the boy discover a surplus, they house it in the grocery cart they push down the roads and highways that remain passable, shuffling onward in their journey toward the coast. No certainty of salvation awaits them there; the man has only a vague sense that things might be better by the ocean. His one true direction—the North Star he steers by now that ambient ash has obscured the night sky—is that the boy must be protected.

Much of the book reads like a primer in the mechanics of post-apocalyptic survival: the man starts campfires in ingenious ways, improvises the tools he needs, and generally MacGyvers his way through a waking nightmare. McCarthy’s writing style lends itself to these sorts of procedural inventories, often stringing several sentence fragments together to form lists and rapid-fire descriptions. Thematically, his sparse punctuation—certain contractions don’t get apostrophes; dialogue lacks quotation marks—contributes to an overall sense of a fraying society with little use for conventions of the past. And the absence of chapter breaks reinforces the seemingly endless nature of the man and the boy’s trek, a bleak pilgrimage that stretches on like the titular road they follow.

But the narrative never feels monotonous. It’s interspersed with tense encounters and bursts of dark poetry such as the excerpt I quoted above and this gem from the same section of the book: “The soft talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor … and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.”

All this was masterful (if brutal). Yet what hit me hardest was the thought of trying to parent a child in such a setting.

Part of it is the imagery—the haunting visuals McCarthy creates and then exposes the boy to. “I don’t think you should see this,” the man says at one point. (Quotation marks added by me for clarity’s sake.) “What you put in your head is there forever?” asks the boy. “Yes.” “It’s okay Papa.” “It’s okay?” “They’re already there.”

Shielding your child from all evil is an impossibility, though. Providing them food and shelter is a fundamental responsibility—and the boy is almost always hungry and cold, his “laddered ribs” shivering against the man at night while they huddle under a plastic tarp as gray rain drizzles down. It’s gut-wrenching to imagine trading places with them.

But I think what really got to me was a simpler horror: the accumulated weight of the boy repeating variations of, “I’m scared. I’m really scared.” Sometimes just when he hears a noise; sometimes after the man asks him to stay behind while he explores the next foreboding building and reminds the boy to lie still in the grass and wait like a fawn. And in every instance, the man is unable to reassure the boy in a way either of them believes.

I’m not a doomsday prepper—I don’t think the events McCarthy presents in The Road are likely to occur. And I appreciate what I took to be one of the themes: that in times of peril, you may not be able to trust everyone, but you have to trust someone.

But what I’ll remember most is that, after reading the last page, this man felt compelled to hug his boy.

(For more reviews like this one, see www.nickwisseman.com) ( )

I despised this book. I found it pretentious and over written. ( )