For me, The Road is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I only read it once, and would never want to read it again, but it just sticks with me in my core.
With that said, it was a awhile back and I don’t remember the style or anything. I did watch and like the movie first I think, maybe that helped me visualize the book as I read it. I remember the movie and book were pretty close in substance.
Regardless, I am only left with the big impression it made on me.
In terms of grammar and sentence structure, he’s good. And I wouldn’t say that Tolkein is any worse of a culprit than many other (primarily fantasy) authors of generating successively longer and longer novels that seem to successively become less and less concerned with the main story and, instead, start to delve into other matters (world building, character drama, inner dialogue, wall decor, etc.)
I think it’s a product of either or both of:
Personally, I think that editors should slice most of this nonsense out, but I’d assume that they are scared to do it when it’s a more famous and successful author.
I had never watched the movie and had only seen a poster so I was pretty blank going in. In my mind I pictured Keith Urban as the man and some generic 7-8 year old boy.
Actually does the book ever say how old the boy is? If it did I missed it. It felt like the timelines didn’t fully make sense. The boy was very young it seemed and there was an early flashback to his mom being pregnant with him during what I assume was the cataclysm. But the world was fully picked over Mad Max style within 5 years or so? Didn’t really line up at the 10000ft lvl. But doesn’t change the quality any.
I know that I read All the Pretty Horses when I was in high school.
At the same time, I read plenty of dense, low action books like Lolita, Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness, etc. my recollection was that this was one of the more boring of the lot.
I’ve been surprised, since then, to see movies being made from his books and that they all seem to have murders, shootouts, etc. They seem like fairly thrilling movies. Looking at the Wikipedia description of Horses, it also looks like there’s quite a lot happening in the book. Yet, somehow, my recollection of it was of a slog and that nothing interesting ever occurred.
I’m not sure if that’s says something about how he presents things or if I somehow just zoned out on this one book.
Read this passage in The Passenger last night and was really moved by it:
“When he got to the cathedral he went up the stairs and went in. Old women lighting candles. The dead remembered here who had no other being and soon would have none at all. His father was on Campañia Hill with Oppenheimer at Trinity. Teller. Bethe. Lawrence. Feynman. Teller was passing around suntan lotion.They stood in goggles and gloves. Like welders. Oppenheimer was a chain smoker with a chronic cough and bad teeth. His eyes were a striking blue. He had an accent of some kind. Almost Irish. He wore good clothes but they hung on him. He weighed nothing. Groves had hired him because he had seen he could not be intimidated. That was all. A lot of very smart people thought he was possibly the smartest man God ever made. Odd chap, that God.
There were people who escaped from Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Sitting on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They walked by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.”
I can put up with a dearth of commas and quotation marks to get to enjoy literature of that standard.
He describes the sensation of evil effectively, better than popular authors like Thomas Harris or Stephen King. As for examining the nature of evil, though, there are probably other writers who’ve excelled him.
I do read books faster when they have a light number of characters. Reading novels, particularly fantasy books with large numbers of characters can slow me down until I really figure out the cast, assuming they come up often enough.