To kick-start the book club and to self-servingly start a discussion on a book I just finished, I'd like to make The Road by Cormac McCarthy the January book of the month. The book came out a few months ago, so it is still in hardback. It is a short read at 241 pgs. and in relatively large print. Almost all the public libraries in the my area had at least one copy if not more, so it shouldn't be too hard to find, hopefully. I'll try to get some discussion going here soon. Q
I just picked this book up with a Christmas gift card (along with a hilarious satire on how-to writing books titled "Fondling Your Muse"). The flap looks interesting, and it will be my first foray into McCarthy's work. It's currently sitting 3rd in my "to read" pile, behind "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" by Bill Bryson and "1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare." I'm about a third of the way through both of them, so I should get to The Road sometime in January (Though I also have to make time for the three books I got for Christmas.)
About the ending... (I'll use result tags) [result]The ending came as somewhat a surprise to me. I didn't expect something even remotely hopeful. It reminded me of the end of Grapes of Wrath in its leaving a glimmer of hope for humanity. As I thought more about it (perhaps too much), I wondered if the part after the man's final dialogue with the boy about the "lost little boy" was actually the man's dying dream. The happy dream, which the last couple pages might be described as, is frequently mentioned by the man as the moment one has given up/died. Maybe it was the perspective change from the man to the boy which caused me to doubt the literal interpretation of the ending, but I felt the boy being picked up by another group of good guys wasn't quite right. [/result]
The impression left from the setting is still with me now, a few weeks later. I was at first a little put off by the constant reiteration of the ashiness, the grayness, and the cold, but about half-way through, I realized it was essential. The landscape of this apocalypse needs to be constantly mentioned, so you don't romanticize the characters and forget the horror of their everyday lives. I often forgot they were walking around wearing plastic masks as I envisioned them walking down the road, until the man had to wash it or switch out the plastic. These reminders helped keep me firmly planted in the dismal setting without drifting too much. It is such a surreal atmosphere that it is amazing McCarthy was able to pull it off so well. Q
I assume that everybody here already knows this, but The Road is the latest selection in Oprah's book club. Faulkner, Tolstoy, and McCarthy.
I didnt' hear that. It was a great book. I just finished Blood Meridian as well. McCarthy is a great writer, but difficult to read until you've gotten into his rhythm. Reading The Road helped me when I went back to Blood Meridian, because I was able to deal with the lack of punctuation and only had to worry about dense archaic diction. Q
I finally got around to reading it. I completely agree about the ending. [result]The new good guy said that they weren't sure if they should even go after the boy. When did they encounter other good guys? They saw the guy that robbed them on the beach and the family that tried to kill them in the town. They didn't encounter any good guys in the weeks leading up to the man's death. One thing that struck me was the mention that the guy in the end had a lanyard. The only other time I remember lanyards being mentioned was in the description of that group of cannibals (the one that had its own private brothel of women and catamites). I just had this bad feeling that the boy's first encounter on his own, without the skepticism of the man, will result in his demise.[/result]
I thought they had been watching the father and boy unseen since they arrived at the beach. Regardless, I take the ending at face value, just because I don't know of another example where McCarthy has substituted dream sequences for reality, or made ambiguous the differentiation between good and evil. One question I have: was there any obvious clues I missed that this was a result of nuclear, chemical or bioligical warfare? Otherwise, my take is that armageddon came via an asteroid or comet.
I thought that McCarthy may have been setting up that ambiguity between good and evil throughout the book (as it was always the father who was wary and cautious and the boy who was too willing to trust everyone). I think it was just the mention of the lanyard that threw me off. It's kind of an odd detail to mention, and it's what made me think what I did about the ending. As to the cause of the setting, my first instinct was asteroid/comet as well. I didn't see any overt clues pointing to a nuclear cause. Would an asteroid cause all of that ash in the landscape and the atmosphere? I really don't know.
The forest fires seemed to be the cause of the ash. At one point they go through a city and the description of the buildings seemed like they had been melted. That was the only reason I thought it may have been nuclear. I don't remember what he saw in his flashback to the day it happened either, just that he saw something out the window and went to fill up the bathtub. Q
Sorry for the bump, but I'm late to the party. 1. The ash and the melted glass and that the father made an observation that he needed to save water suggests to me nuclear holocaust. 2. The repeated discussion of good dreams and bad dreams and what they tell us leads me to think the child's "rescue" is a death dream of the child. The father is too smart to have that as a dream (what a hollow saving just to have to continue to live in such a world), so it must be the child's own dream. The odd ending passage suggests to me as well that neither consciousness of our protagonist is around any longer. And the "each the other's world entire" kind of makes clear that the man lives only to help the child and the boy lives to give purpose to his papa - they are purposively tied. 3. I've only read this and No Country by McCarthy, but this book struck me as about the moral ambiguity involved in parenting. Should the father have killed the boy years ago? Is what the mother did wrong? Should the father be helping those along they way? Anyway, the movie looks stupidly cast.