"The Road", Cormac McCarthy

The Road
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
Vintage, ebook

The Road is the chronicle of the journey of a father and his son, but forget the typical road novel. We are in an undetermined future in a post-apocalyptic world; all signs of civilization had been burnt down to the basis by an undefined catastrophe. In this world, the man and his son travel south, without any final destination; they just hope that things will be better in the south. They have to spend most of their time looking for stores to avoid them from starving to death. If that wasn't bad enough, they also have to keep themselves save, because as world has been reduced to a gray amount of debris and ashes, humanity has gone back to the ages when men ate each other.

The Road is a fascinating novel. It is deeply hopeless, because we face a world on which life has almost disappeared and just a few men and woman have survived and are engaged in a permanent struggle for surviving. The man and the boy just keep walking south, keeping with them a few blankets, and their stores. World has become a place beyond all kinds of law, either legal and moral, and the only goal to reach is to live one more day. It is an incredibly tough narration, specially when we read about the men and women kept in a cellar as food or when the man tries to explain the boy that they can't help the people they find in the road because it might suppose them their own death a few days later.

Obviously, there are times when the devastated world almost seems to be a good place, as when they find a bunker where they can keep themselves comfortable, warm, dry and well fed. But even in those moments, the reader can't avoid the sensation that something bad is bound to happen, so you can never help a certain sensation of anguish while reading. In fact, anguish would be the sensation that better defines the book. I also can thing of other words: grey, fear, hunger, love. Because what we should not forget is that in the end this novel is also a book about the love of a father to his son, a man trying to save his son from evil while he also tries to make him clear what is good and what is fair in the world there are living in.

The Road is a very good book, a fascinating novel that faces us with the hell on earth to show us that love can prevail over everything. In my opinion, it has become a modern classic.