The Road

Just finished it, in tears. So bleak but I couldn't stop reading it. I didn't much like the writing style when I first started reading it (sentence fragments, missing punctuation, kind of a Stephen King style just-the-facts-ma'am thing going on), but either I got used to it or it started to seem right for the story.Most postapocalyptic novels take place in the time directly after the breakdown of civilzation, in a world populated with feral animals or human cults fighting for survival; but this story is later, in a haunted and deserted world, a world where almost nothing remains. The main conflict is not human versus human or even human versus nature, but human versus despair.The more I think about this book, the more I feel like there was a lot going on, despite the unadorned writing and the ambiguity of many of the plot elements. It's a story pared down to just the grim essentials, just as the man and boy found their lives reduced to a hopeless journey, one day at a time. McCarthy sketches in the vaguest of hints, leaving a lot of space for you to fill in the details from your own imagination. In an echo of the boy's life, you start the story somewhere in the middle, able only to infer what came before; and like the man's death, you leave the story with loose ends undone, with no assurance of what will happen after your part is done.Overall, a little too gritty and realistic for me to want to read it twice. I hoped for some kind of redemption at the end, but McCarthy only offered up more ambiguity, as if to shrug and say “this is the best I can do, this is the world as it is.”I sense in it hints of [b:Winter's Tale 12967 Winter's Tale Mark Helprin http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328874917s/12967.jpg 1965767], though, and I love it for that. The barest implication that there is a hidden justice to the workings of the world, something wilder and more incomprehensible than a god, but present nonetheless. Or possibly just humans and the way we carry hope like a flame in our hearts, even in a world where the worst has come to pass and there is nothing left to hope for.