Imagine a world torn by fire and ravaged “by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes” where an ashen landscape is the backdrop for the journey of a father and his son seeking salvation and carrying a small hope that there’s still an untainted place of good left on this earth. This journey is told so terrifyingly horribly and yet so realistically by Cormac McCarthy in The Road.

The father and son are never named other than the man and boy in the story and this style makes them seem closer together, it makes you believe in them, like they’re somebody you know or somebody you could know. McCarthy makes you like them because they are “the good guys” that are “carrying the fire” of hope and salvation in a world of ash and evil. In this post-apocalyptic world where hydrangeas and wild orchids are “ashen effigies” of themselves where marching bands of cannibalistic gangs loot the land where buildings are melted and tipped with the windows like icing where interstates are filled with long lines of charred and rusting cars, the two are “each others world entire” and only survive together.

The story line revolves around the journey of a man and his son traveling to the sea with a revolver with two bullets, a cart filled with a couple blankets and some canned food and each other, but there’s always something going on some sort of trouble and tension between everything else in this barren scorched landscape.

Even though the boy is the only thing keeping the father going and the world is so horrible that the father would rather have the son, his son commit suicide rather than be captured and eaten or forced to be a catamite of these marauding bands. The boy’s mother couldn’t handle a world like this and killed herself while the boy was still very young. The world is ugly and full of ash but the love that McCarthy creates between the man and the boy makes you believe that there’s still some good left in the world and that they will reach salvation. The father says “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world”.

The first time I read it I didn’t really like this book, but I read it again and I really started to like The Road. I liked it because of McCarthy’s style of writing, the love the man and boy have for each other, and how they over come all these hardships together and still have hope of a better world. McCarthy’s style of writing is nothing like I’ve ever read before and I like it, it’s poetic. His story is a story of love and many horrifying hardships of a man and a boy journeying through a land blasted by some apocalypse some years ago. You should read it and think. Just think.