I’m sure you’ve all heard about The Road by now. It’s a bleak post-apocalyptic story about a father and son trudging along a road through desolation, trying to reach the southern coast where they might find a warmer climate and survive the winter. Everything is burned to ash, most people and all animals are dead, stores and houses have already been looted so it’s difficult to find anything to eat. And the few survivors they meet are extremely dangerous men. The only thing really keeping them going is their love for each other, their despair in seeing each other suffer, the faint glimmer of hope that on the coast they might survive. Because alone, neither one of them would last long.
I didn’t really have this book on my TBR but when my neighbor having just finished it, offered to loan it to me, I figured why not see what everyone’s talking about? Plus, his copy was pretty beat up and it’s an author I haven’t read before, so I could count it for both the New Authors and the Dogeared reading challenges. Although I read through it pretty quickly, in a matter of two days, not really wanting to put it down, somehow it left me unmoved in the end. Plenty of awful things happen in this book. It is disturbing and depressing and dismal. But I didn’t cry. I don’t feel devastated and horrified, although I think I ought to.
Perhaps it is the writing style: brief, clipped sentences which readily reflect the atmosphere of the book. Not to say they aren’t descriptive; at the end I looked up some twenty-four words that were unfamiliar to me, and found they all had a very precise meaning. But the concise writing, while enabling me to read through the book very quickly, failed to connect me emotionally. And the few hints at what had happened prior to the book’s events- what caused it all, where is the boy’s mother- are scanty enough to leave you to come up with your own ideas, which I found frustrating. I just wanted to know more. To feel more. This might be one case where the film outshines the book, I just might respond more to a visual impact than I did the paucity of details in the text.
So… I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. It’s a good book, I was engaged and intent to find out what happened next all the way through. But it didn’t leave much of an emotional impact on me, despite all the horrors therein and the heartstring-tugging relationship between father and son.