I’d been wanting to get a hold of this for a couple of years but had never actually come across it in a local book shop. ‘The Road’ is possibly the bleakest fiction I’ve ever read.  The story follows a boy and his father struggling to survive in a journey south to the coast across the wastes of a post-apocalyptic landscape. If that doesn’t sound like your sort of thing don’t be put off, there is practically nothing  in the way of scinetific or political background in the novel leading you to infer from your own knowledge and the descriptions of a world carpeted in ash what has occurred. The image in your head will be as much your own as McCarthy’s.

Having read plenty of this sort of fiction the innovative aspect here is the air of total finality, destruction and loss that permeates the story.  There is little balancing of dark and light here. Much post-apocalyptic fiction depicts a ruined world, but in McCarthy’s you find yourself wondering how long the oxygen might last and if even the bacteria will survive. Some of the scenes are truly horrible but are never unbelieveable and there is no time given to the characters for hand wringing or moralising because the concepts have become irrelevant.

It is to the author’s skill that the never properly explained mantra of “carrying the fire” that father and son use to describe retaining their ‘humanity’ as they travel from day to day isn’t hopelessly at odds with their ability to survive, which is most often down to quick thinking and more often to luck. The novel is short, due to the lack of background, slimmed down character development and lack of participants for dialogue but also only as long as it has to be to portray the story. The prose is skilled all the way through, with the final paragraph (which is more poetic than anything else in the novel) fitting as a closing thought, reward to the reader and moral of the story all at the same time.