“There is no God and we are his prophets.”

Darkness and ash fill the skies. A life that they had known is gone. A father and son are walking to the coast, and along the way he cares for his son by protecting him, by teaching him how to survive during their long walk through what is now barren land of America. What do they expect to find at the coast? Warmer weather? Less ash? What destroyed the planet? The author never says, he doesn’t have to because we already know deep within.

Conversation is limited. The boy’s father has ash in his lungs, and if you can’t breathe, you say as little as possible. You just have to walk, to get there. And then there is the shock of what had happened, the death of family, of friends, of most who were once living. What does anyone who has survived have to say?

“Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.”

“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.

You forget some things, dont you?

Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”

The most beautiful prose, the most powerful words are in this book, and it feels like every word is a jewel or a reminder of what can and shouldn’t be.

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

Note.

Cormac McCarthy said in an interview that this book is a love story to his son and so considered his son a co-author. They had both been in a hotel room, his son sleeping while he was looking out the window at the city below, and in his mind’s eye he saw the town being destroyed by fire, and that was how he realized this book.--.

Me tuvo al borde de un ataque de ansiedad todo el tiempo. Puede convertirse en uno de mis favoritos. Una barbaridad de libro magistralmente escrito. La historia de un padre y su hijo, en un mundo post apocalíptico, luchando día con día por sobrevivir, sin alimento, sin refugio, caminando por la orilla de una carretera, rumbo el sur, en busca del calor y el mar, todo está cubierto de cenizas, el agua es escasa y deben enfrentarse a otros que, como ellos, buscan mantenerse vivos. La historia entre estos dos personajes lleva un mensaje precioso, el amor y resistir. Tiene un gran final. LIBRAZO

Brutal, blunt, and oddly personal. One of the best examples of post-apocalyptic fiction. truly poignant! listened to the audiobook read by Tom Stechschulte. It was really good and i highly recommend it! one of the best audiobooks i have listen to on Audible, elevated the work IMO!

Love the way McCarty wrote this very short understated statements saying more than what is being said. And the astute reader can elaborate on the meaning and add their own belief to the meaning. Okay never meant so much. I'm not saying this style always works but seemed perfect for the post-apocalyptic genre. I have also heard of complaints of the writing style in print. Which is why i highly recommend the audiobook. I could write a review with quotes telling you my interpretation or talk about the hidden symbolisms. But I'm not that type of reviewer read it and make you're own assumptions. You will probably make better conclusions than me since I'm really not that astute. Anyway, the boy and his father travel down the road just trying to survive the struggle for survival renderers everything to the bluntest extreme. It's that simple right well it depends on what to add to it!

so why 4 stars? well.... it's not a fun read the ending is happyish but overall it's hardcore depressing. also a little repetitive at times. now time to watch the movie!

The view that there are two independent, primal forces in the universe, one good and one evil, is called dualism. According to dualism, the good God does the best he can to promote good and combat evil but he can only do so much since evil is a powerful counterforce in its own right. The ancient Gnostics were dualist with their scriptures emphasizing the mythic rather than the historic and positing our evil world of matter created not by an all-powerful God but by a flawed deity called the Demiurge. In contrast to the Demiurge, the good God of light resides above our earthly material universe in a pure, spiritual realm called the Pleroma.

I mention dualism and Gnosticism here since I read in Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country For Old Men the following dialogue between a good old Texas boy by the name of Sheriff Bell and his old Uncle Ellis:
Sheriff Bell asks: “Do you think God knows what's happenin?”
Uncle Ellis replies – “I expect he does.”
Bell then asks – “You think he can stop it?”
To this Uncle Ellis answers – “No. I dont.”

By these answers, whether he knows it or not, Uncle Ellis is expressing Gnostic dualism. Of course, McCarthy's worldview isn't necessarily the worldview of one of his characters, in this case Uncle Ellis, but my sense after reading No Country for Old Men McCarthy's worldview isn't that far removed from Gnostic dualism; rather, the world and society McCarthy creates is absolutely soaking in evil. The evil is so strong in this McCarthy novel, one could say evil is the primal force of the universe.

A world where evil is the primal force is given an even more complete and deeper expression in McCarthy's post-Apocalyptic novel The Road, where a man and his son travel south to avoid the oncoming winter cold. Why am I saying this? Let me offer a couple observations around two quotes:

We read a reflection of the man when he was a boy about age thirteen prior to the apocalypse, "Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough men, watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number; the dull tubes of them beginning to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched them burn and writhe and blacken in just such silence themselves and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with his own thoughts to go home to their suppers." One can only wonder what brought about the actual apocalypse in the novel. Perhaps, similar to these men, world leaders attempted to remedy the image of evil on a macro level.

Here is a typical scene the man and boy come upon: "Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers. A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling." No more quotes are needed as I am sure you get the idea - a shadowy, menacing, ash-filled landscape populated by humans hunting and killing and eating one another.

What creates the drama in this dark, sinister, stinking world is the love the man has for the boy, his son, and the love the boy has for the man, his papa. Also, the compassion the boy has for those they encounter on the road. All through their experience on the road, can we say the man holds a Gnostic-like dualist view? He experiences the intensity of the world's evil to be sure. However, his belief in a Gnostic light realm is paradoxical. Sometimes he reflects there is only this evil world of matter, harrowing and unrelenting; and yet sometimes he recognizes the boy as a messenger come from that otherworldly realm of light.

Rather than attempting an answer, I suggest reading with these ideas of dualism and Gnosticism in mind as one way of contemplating and appreciating the philosophical and theological dimensions of McCarthy’s bleak novel.


Cormac McCarthy - American novelist and independent spirit par excellence

El estilo narrativo de Mccarthy no es fácil y cuesta acostumbrarse a él, pero, a pesar de esto, es un libro lleno de amor: el amor de un padre a su hijo.
También hay violencia y dolor, pero el amor paterno lo inunda todo. Y eso es muy hermoso.

McCarthy's narrative style is not easy and hard to get used to, but despite this, it is a book full of love: a father's love for his son.
There is also violence and pain, but paternal love floods everything. And that's very beautiful.

This wasn't nearly as funny as everybody says it is.

He palmed the spartan book with black cover and set out in the gray morning. Grayness, ashen. Ashen in face. Ashen in the sky.

He set out for the road, the book in hand. Bleakness, grayness. Nothing but gray, always.

He was tired and hungry. Coughing. The coughing had gotten worse. He felt like he might die. But he couldn't die. Not yet.

The boy depended on him.

He walked down the road, awaiting the creaking bus. It trundled from somewhere, through the gray fog. The ashen gray fog.

He stepped aboard, spartan book in hand. No one spoke. They were all ghosts. Tired, wrinkled, rumpled, going wherever. Not knowing why. Just going.

He opened the book and read. He began to see a pattern, a monotonous pattern of hopelessness. Chunks of gray hopelessness. Prose set in concrete, gray. Gray blocks of prose. He read.
He recognized images from films long since past, and books from authors of yore. Many science fiction writers, many movie makers. He thought he saw a flash, something familiar. Perhaps it was only one of his nagging dreams. A dream of what once existed, but he did not know. Wasn't there once, he wondered, a story called "A Boy And His Dog," by, who? Ellison, maybe? Was that the name? It seemed right, but his mind was unreliable. It had not been reliable in awhile. People forget. Yes, they forget.

And here, a fragment, "The Last Man on Earth," "The Omega Man," "Dawn of the Dead," "Planet of the Apes," "The Day After," "The Twilight Zone." Yes, that one, the one about the man and the books. The broken glasses. Cannibals, people in rags, charred bodies, emptiness, grayness. "On the Beach" popped into his mind. His gray, dulled mind. "The Andromeda Strain." Dessicated bodies. Dusty, leathered, ashen bodies.

The rain, the snow, the white, the cold, the gray. The endless white. The endless gray. "Escape from New York..." The titles seemed endless, but they blended in his wearied mind. Had he not read and seen all this a thousand times before? What was he to make of this book he held, this spartan black book, this cobbling of all that had come before, all set forth again? Was this original, he wondered? He continued to read. But he was tired, flagging. Rain, tin food, wet blankets, shivering, twigs and fire and cold. Always cold, and gray. And walking, slowly. Always walking down the road. And hiding. Hiding and walking. Ceaselessly. And atrocities. Savagery. Road warriors, the bad guys. Did this also not seem familiar? The man wondered, but his mind, like those of most of the masses, often forgot. He thanked an unseen God for this forgetfulness, for it made it easier for him to read, uncritically, unknowingly. The author, McCarthy, no doubt also must have been relieved that no one cared anymore. Plagiarism belonged to the dead past. A quaint notion of a bygone day. Not a concern, in these gray times. The times of sampling. Of plunder.
My concoction is out of a tin can, he might have thought. But he did not. Tin food, prepackaged. Cans waiting to be plucked and plundered.

He opened the literary beenie weenies, and served them to the world. And the world ate, hungrily ate. And believed, that beenie weenies, on their empty stomachs, tasted like the greatest gourmet dish they had ever tasted. For they knew not any better. Their gray matter just did not know.

And they went on down the road.


------
(KR@KY 2009, amended only very slightly in 2016)
NOTE: This review was written about, and during, bus rides to work while reading this book. To date, it is my most popular review on Goodreads, and for that I thank everyone. It appeared on the Publisher's Weekly website in an article on best parody reviews on Goodreads. Thanks to everyone who agreed with me and to also those who disagreed and vigorously defended the book.

How to Write Like Cormac McCarthy

1. Make sure the first sentence contains a verb.

2. But neither the second.

3. Nor the third.

4. Repeat until finished.

5. Or sooner deterred.



We'll Become Well Eventually

The Boy: Papa?

Papa: Yes?

The Boy: What's this?

Papa: It's an apostrophe.

The Boy: What does it do?

Papa: It takes two words and turns them into a contraction.

The Boy: Is that good?

Papa: Years ago people used to think it was good.

The Boy: What about now?

Papa: Not many people use them now.

The Boy: Does the world already have enough contractions, Papa?

Papa: I hadn't thought of it like that. But you might be on to something.

The Boy: What difference would it make if we threw away all the apostrophes?

Papa: Not much. I don't think.

The Boy: I wonder if we could get rid of the apostrophe, then maybe...

Papa: Yes?

The Boy: You could say we'll be well.

Papa: You're right. You know. But it could get confusing. If you wrote it down. Without an apostrophe. "Well be well."

The Boy: But really, Papa, if we could take away just one apostrophe, do you think we'll become well? Eventually. All of us?

Papa: We could.

The Boy: Well, then, if we can get rid of all of the apostrophes, we will.

Papa: But then there wouldn't be any contractions!

The Boy: Papa!

Papa: Haha. I wish your grammar could hear you talking!



In Praise of the Verb to Grow

Out of ashen gray
Frequently grow sentences
Of colored beauty.



All Things of Grace and Beauty
[An Assemblage of Favourite Sentences]

Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.n  No fall but preceded by a declination.nHe caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.n  No one travelled this land.nEver's a long time.n  Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.nThe sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark.n  On this road there are no godspoke men.nHow does the never to be differ from what never was?n  By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.nThe ash fell on the snow until it was all but black.n  Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands.nThe day providential to itself.n  All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance of pain.nWe're survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp.n  A black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it.nIn the darkness and the silence he could see bits of light that appeared random on the night grid.n  The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.nThe dark serpentine of a dead vine running down it like the track of some enterprise on a graph.n  A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some slow hydraulic axisn...a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed.n  The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth.nThere is no God and we are his prophets.n  They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo...nLike the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of.n  One vast salt sepulchre.nThere were few nights lying in the dark when he did not envy the dead.n  I will not send you into the darkness alone.nThe mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline.n  A living man spoke these lines.nTen thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.n  The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be.nThe sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.n  There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today.n



Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - "The Beach" (The Road Soundtrack)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bN-u...



Alternative Dystopian Ending Haiku



In the silver light
Of the moon above the beach,
A big squid ate them.

Reading is usually an escape and a solace for me.

Still, sometimes, I go for dystopian, post-apocalyptic and speculative fiction, and I wonder if maybe I’m a masochist because instead of escaping, I often come out the other end contemplating humanity and slightly to moderately traumatised.

So yeah, safe to say that The Road is not your typical road trip. It is a post-apocalyptic hellscape, treading a thin line between humanity and savagery including the morbid realisation that cannibalism is a valid life choice.

This tale featuring a nameless man and boy is meandering, raw, ashy, grey, gritty, harrowing, disturbing and punctuated with the depraved horror that humanity is capable of. It made me question my existence whilst simultaneously developing an appreciation for Coca-Cola, canned goods and colours.

Cormac’s way with words is minimalist and haunting. While I can appreciate other readers hit a speed bump with the guy’s unadorned writing style, inclusive of a refusal to use apostrophes and quotation marks, it became an acquired taste for me, maybe because I interpreted it as mirroring the no-frills, desolate harsh reality of the setting.

[Edit: It is not all horrifying and bleak. There are moments of beauty and hope, but def don't ask me about the ratio.]

Overall, if you’re looking for an uplifting read, perhaps don’t read this. But if you don’t mind being plunged into a dark post-apocalyptic wasteland with the charred remains of civilisation in a soul-crushing struggle for survival this one’s a winner and a must-read for genre enthusiasts.

And now I'm off to go stare at a field of sunflowers or a blue ocean or hug a puppy or something!
_____

Currently staring into space, processing. Review to come.

What a great and disturbing read. You'll follow father and son walking cross country to the sea in an post apocalyptic world. Fellow human beings are hostile (there is a distinction between good and bad guys but you'll only find the bad or indifferent ones). God is gone. Our two characters live day by day trying to survive. No positive outlook, rain and cold block their progress. Human race is almost extinct. The dialogues between father and son are short, like their daily portions of food. How will this grim tale end? I won't tell but couldn't put this depressing but enthralling novel down. You don't want to walk a mile in the shoes of the main characters. Prose, language and style are masterly. To me definitely a candidate worth for the Nobel Prize. Highly recommended!

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
The Road ~~  Cormac McCarthy



I believe  Cormac McCarthy's  The Road may well be the greatest novel of the 21st-century. Yes,  The Road is heartbreaking, but it is filled with hope. It is a love story ~~ definitely the purest love story I have ever read.



Cormac McCarthy's prose is poetic ~~ he wrote the interactions between father and son so simply and yet so powerfully. It’s easy to see how  The Road won a Pulitzer.

The Road is without a doubt one of the most engrossing, absorbing, and emotional post-apocalyptic novels I've read. It is a literary classic. In a world on the brink, it is very easy to slip into the worn and wearied shoes of the man and the boy ~~ and yet, these characters n  carry the fire.n It is a comfort to know that human kindness and compassion can and will survive. Highly recommended.

“Are you carrying the fire?”

What does one say about THE ROAD?
This text is brutally disheartening and uplifting, and all at the same time. Not an easy feat to accomplish! I won't rehash any plot points here, but I will say that Cormac McCarthy is a master at using his prose to exploit the emotions of his readers. The characters are indeed flat and one dimensional, as some negative reviews have pointed out, however, that is the point. They are archetypal characters, and are the Everyman of medieval morality plays. The boy is the young innocent, as yet untainted by the corrupting forces of maturation and humanity. He still possesses the "light" of human compassion, responsibility, and morality. The father represents the man searching for grace and redemption in a world where he can no longer find it. But there is the son, his (and our) hope.

You as the reader find yourself elated at a simple trove of old, shriveled apples. Rejoicing in the father's momentary find of abundance in a bleak landscape.
You find yourself devastated when you can understand the father's motives for abandoning other survivors to certain death. Wishing that you, like the boy, could not.
You find yourself pondering at the wise and quizzical ranting of the "prophet" Ely, and wondering why those kinds of people always provide more questions than answers.
And your heart soars when you discover at novel's end that death is not the end of all things, and that hope is undying and not an aspect of humanity easily extinguished. You realize it is something that is innate in us all, and if we cultivate and protect it in ourselves, there will always be a chance for humanity.

Quotes:
•t“…shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”
•t“If only my heart were stone.”
•t“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever.”
•t“You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”
•t“If you break little promises you’ll break big ones.”
•t“All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain.”
•t“My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God.”
•t“What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”
•t“He knew he was placing hopes where he’d had no reason to.”
•t“No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.”
•t“A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here.”

Is THE ROAD an allegory? Maybe?
Is it Biblical in character, prose, and story? Definitely!
Read this text, but read it with others so that you can discuss it. It will make for a rewarding experience.
*On this, my second read, it was indeed for my book club and it made for an interesting discussion.