The three last words of his extraordinary new novel are “hummed of mystery”. They refer to the world that has been lost, the world before Homo sapiens blundered on the scene. But they could equally well serve as the book’s epitaph.
Books The Road
- Author
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Cormac McCarthy
- Year
- 2006
- Publisher
- Alfred Knopf
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The novel opens on a world that seems to have been demolished by the psychopaths of McCarthy’s earlier fiction…
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Reads as though Samuel Beckett had dared himself to outdo Harlan Ellison. […] This book announces the triumph of language over nothingness. Or as the heroic father and son would put it: This book carries the fire.
Clive Sinclair
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The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. Abandoning gruff but profound male camaraderie, McCarthy instead sounds the limits of imaginable love and despair between a diligent father and his timid young son, “each other’s world entire”.
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This is an exquisitely bleak incantation—pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes.
Our Thoughts
Cormac McCarthy transforms a hackneyed genre, overhauling familiar motifs with pioneering prose. Thrilling, terrifying in parts, The Road left me reeling.
— Lily Power
Henderson the Rain King
Coming into the Country
Sabbatical: A Romance
The Wasp Factory
The Buddha of Suburbia
One Hundred Years of Solitude