Title : The Road
Author : Cormac McCarthy
Genre : Sci-fi (Post-apocalyptic)
Narrators : Rupert Degas
Listening Length : 5 hours
Rating : 4.3/5
Narrator Rating : 5/5

The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel, and it has for the most part only two characters a father and a son. Neither is named – the father is just “the man” and the son is just “the boy”. Both are walking towards the oceanside towns and to do this they must pass through deserted, burned through cities. We don’t know why the world is in this condition, but we realize that most of humanity has been wiped out. Those that remain compete for resources, stealing, killing and cannibalizing for survival.

McCarthy describes the pitiable condition of the two. Food, water and medicines are scarce. They have very few belongings which they store in a shopping cart that they pull alongside as they walk. They forage though deserted homes to replenish their meager supplies of food, and clothes, and keep a low profile to avoid detection by hostile gangs of marauders.

“The world soon to be 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. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early 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. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.”

The man, a good guy as he puts it, only wants to protect his child, but the son is still innocent of the horrors of the world and is completely dependent on his father for survival. That survival is tenuous and their journey is fraught with danger.

What gets me about this novel besides the edge-of-seat tension that I usually experience only while watching movies, is the depiction of fatherly love. It is deep and pure and constant and heart-wrenching to witness, especially when you know that the father must realize the hopelessness of their condition but still remain stoic and hopeful for his son’s survival. My heart went out to him.

I didn’t see the movie because I though it’d be hard watching the hapless plight of a 9 year old, but the book isn’t any easier – essentially McCarthy does a marvelous job of conveying to us the hopelessness of the situation.

This Pulitzer-winner is a dark and grim novel to listen to, but it is beautifully written. Narrator Degas is fabulous to listen to, since he conveys to us the harsh truth of survival, the father’s grim resolve and the innocence and purity of the boy. Degas’s narration won the AudioFile Earphones Award.