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Jan 31, 2018RogerDeBlanck rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Over the course of a long and distinguished career, Cormac McCarthy’s work has established him among the elite in American literature. Tracing Western themes in past and contemporary milieus, he has created his own mythology of tough American figures etching their rugged and oftentimes brutally violent presence along the borderland region of the Southwest. In perhaps his most personally revealing novel, The Road takes a grave look at the future. The novel may be a divergence from the settings of McCarthy’s previous body of work, but his prose ascends to a profoundly new level of artistry as he charts the travails of an unnamed father and his son through a post-apocalyptic world of burned-out cities and ash-covered landscapes. This is a story of unimaginable devastation, but it is also a tale of remarkable survival and ultimately an unforgettable portrait of love between father and son. The tragedy that has befallen the world in The Road forces the father and son to encounter great suffering, yet McCarthy’s imagery and descriptions, though terrifying in their vision, contain a beauty that is heartbreaking and unbearable. It’s as though his language proclaims the stubbornness of life against the void capable within the hands of human destructiveness. Here is one example: “By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.” In this world of death and demise, seemingly without hope, McCarthy asserts a precaution of future nuclear holocaust. In doing so, he points out a biblical-like truth about the Earth: “The frailty of everything revealed at last.” This is a disturbing book, but the love generated between the father and his son places goodness against the disaster the world has become. The poetic beauty McCarthy finds in the madness will grip readers and