I haven’t seen the movie because of my Peter Jackson rule,* but I don’t understand how you could think the Kindly Man was going to eat the Boy. If he had such intent, why would he go to any subterfuge? The boy was, well, a boy. If the Kindly Man wanted to eat him, he’d just shoot him.
I’m also – well, uncertain – why you would prefer an ambiguous ending. The Road isn’t a horror story or torture porn; those are plot-driven, all about twists and turns and betrayals and boobs. Though it’s set in a horrifying setting, The Road is a character-driven piece, about the way living after the end has changed the Man – about his struggle to remain good when there’s no reason to believe that there’s any point to it.
Back when Fellowship of the Rings hit theatres, some reviewer on Salon or Slate or some such wrote that it was a Christian story about living in a world in which God has not revealed itself. The Road is akin to that, methinks; it’s about remaining faithful to God when there’s every indication that God has gone fishing and ain’t coming back.
To wit: “Never watch movies based on books you love, Skaldimus. They only annoy you and lead to you annoying others.”
I read the book, enjoyed it. I think I prefer Blood Meridian but of the McCarthy books I’ve read The Road probably comes second. I asked on here before about the nature of the disaster. I think my favourite passage in the book was the description of the cities.
I’ll join in the love for Blood Meridian. It’s an awesome book, in the Biblical sense of the word “awesome,” if there is such a sense.
I know McCarthy’s lack of punctuation is an affectation, but hell, I love e.e. cummings too, so I can’t complain. It works for me for some reason.
The wife’s suicide was a well-balanced dish of horrible awfulness and understandableness. I don’t blame her, even though it was a terrible thing to do.
I enjoyed speculating on the cataclysm, but it doesn’t matter what it was, and I prefer not to be certain. Its ambiguity, like many of the other ambiguities in the book, made it more compelling for me. There’s so much stuff in the real world that I don’t understand; why would fiction be different?
Maybe the ending was deus ex machina. I left the book figuring the kid still wouldn’t make it to adulthood, and even if he did, so what? With the collapse of the ecosystem and the general lack of sunlight, the human race was doomed.
Except for Suttree, The Road is my least favorite of his books. It’s not much of a surprise and emotionally accessible. A lot of his other books are work, and a shock to your ideas about life and humanity. The Road does this, but not in as startling a manner as the others.
Talking about petty-- it bugs the hell out of me that he writes ‘sit in the floor.’ On, on, on!
I’ve read (nah, I tried to read) Blood Meridian and I have read No Country for Old Men. Since I really enjoyed the latter and thoroughly dispised the former, The Road falls neatly between those two: it had its moments, and its setup was great, but ultimately I’m not sure why I should have read it.
Less annoying than the inexplicable shifts in diction in Blood Meridian, certainly; in fact, I don’t think it bothered me in this book, except for my general disbelief in such formal games. Must’ve been great when first done, now, it’s an affectation that doesn’t add to the meaning of your books, especially when you do it in every friggin book!
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Neither-nor. This element, though, I found somewhat explicable, in the sense that it helps us understand the meaninglessness of previous life.
Understandable.
I’d also say that it doesn’t really matter what it was, and in fact, I would suggest that the very fact that we’re not told is vital. This is the end of civilization, perhaps the end of life on Earth: what matter what caused it? It’s the dealing with it that’s important.
No, not at all, because everything in the book has led us to conclude that there really is no “rescue” possible–just a prolongation of suffering and depravation, with occasional moments of happiness. The question is: are the moments of happiness worth the suffering, and leaving the boy alive at the end is precisely asking that question. Good move on McCarthy’s part.
My overall problem with the story is that precisely because it is so bleak and no-hopey, it really didn’t have any justification for its plot. I certainly didn’t believe at any point that any of the destinations the man and the boy were trying to reach were in any way going to be more interesting than any others, and consequently, the repeat difficulties they encountered seemed both episodic and unmotivated. There’s a reason it’s a very short book (I believe I read it in something like two hours), but it doesn’t even carry its short length very well, I thought. His setup was far more original than the individual elements of the plot (cannibals! hidden food stores! kindly co-travellers! I’ve seen it all…).
I briefly tried to read Blood Meridian last year when I was in England, and couldn’t do it - the writing style was just unbearable to me. I also felt that the premise of the book may have been plagiarised from Hogg, and I’m not just saying that to be provocative - I really mean it. Judge Holden is too close to the character of Hogg for it to be just a coincidence, especially considering the rape and pederasty, and the narrator’s relationship to Holden’s gang is quite similar to the narrator of Hogg and the gang of “rape artists.” I highly suspect that McCarthy read Delany’s work and tried to copy it.
As for the nuclear bomb, I assumed the man never mentioned radiation because it was something he had absolutely no control over. All he could control was their search for food, shelter and so forth. It somehow never occurred to me that it could have been an asteroid.
I always thought of a McGuffin as being the mysterious, vaguely-defined object of a quest…sort of pulling the plot forward, rather than propelling it from the back.
I liked Blood Meridian but it’s a difficult read (it was for me anyway) and it’s bleaker and more brutal than The Road. I’m not saying don’t read it but if you find that you don’t like it consider the Border Trilogy or No Country for Old Men, they’re much more accessible.
But Hogg was written in 1969. An updated draft was prepared in 1973. Delany shopped it around trying to get it published for decades; nobody wanted to touch it. The literary community is tight, and it’s not inconceivable that McCarthy read the Hogg manuscript prior to writing Blood Meridian.
Both books feature a traveling gang of extremely dangerous characters. Both books have a young boy join the gang and accompany them on their exploits. In both books, the boy has no real name, known only as “the kid/the cocksucker”. Both books are ostensibly “about” this boy, but really centered around a different character. In both of those books, that character is:
[ul]
[li]Extremely physically large[/li][li]Pale-skinned[/li][li]Highly intelligent[/li][li]Violent and sadistic[/li][li]A rapist[/li][li]A pederast.[/li][/ul]