Bookish Tuesday: The Road

I've been surrounding myself with post-apocalyptic media quite a lot recently. Watching the Jeremiah TV show, playing through Fallout 3, reading The Hunger Games (which, by the way, I breezed through 300 pages to finish last Tuesday if that says how much I enjoyed it), playing Left 4 Dead... I could go on. Anyway, I added on to this by reading The Road this weekend.

I've not read anything else by Cormac McCarthy, but the first thing I had to learn while reading The Road was that the style takes a bit of time to get used to. There are no chapter structures and time jumps around in between paragraphs, plus there is no use of quotation marks so I had some trouble trying to find out who was talking. Both of the main characters are nameless (referred to only as the man and the boy) and while it could also be confusing, I thought that it helped to add to the brokenness of the world around them.

The man and the boy are a father and son who live in a world that is devoid of nearly all life. It is never explained what exactly happened, but the world is left covered in ash and the characters spend the book travelling south through the former USA. There is no clear goal in mind during their travels, and the entire book seems to be a story of futility.

The relationship between the man and the boy is incredibly well written with the love that the man has for the boy showing in nearly every action and decision that he makes and even though their conversations are minimal and rare, more can be gleaned from what is not said than from what they actually talk about.

I will say that after finishing the book, I felt a little frustrated with everything that happened (or didn't happen), but after having most of today to digest, I really like it. The little glimpses of human life that you see during the man and the boy's travels are enough to see what has become of the world and the discussions of hope are enough to keep me going even after the book ends.

The Road has been adapted to a film that will be released later this year starring Viggo Mortenson (Aragorn, if you will) as the man. While I normally whine and complain about adaptations, I really think that this book could be done well as a film. If they keep well to the restrictive use of dialogue and action of the book, I think it could be an amazing character piece. Although, we'll only know for sure when the movie comes out later this year.