Synopsis: Walking through the burned out ravages of America, a father and son make their way towards the coast, where they hope that things will be better. Savage men stalk the road, their eyes open for anything that can benefit themselves at any cost. Armed only with a pistol, the clothes they are wearing and a cart of scavenged food, the journey of the boy and his father becomes a desperate quest for survival and redemption.

Review: Dedicated to his son, Cormac McCarthy’s harrowing novel is an imaginative exploration of a future world, devastated by some unexplained cataclysmic event. What makes the novel particularly poignant is the realism of the relationship between the anonymous father and son. Not giving them names adds to their power as kind of Everyman figures – what would we do faced with the same deprivation and devastation?

The narrative is punctuated with the conversations of father and son. The son’s contributions are always short or in the form of interrogatives, giving the sense of the child’s youth, and adding to the poignancy of his precarious position. Throughout their quest to reach the coast, during which they pass through dusty ravaged landscapes and meet a series of dangerous or desperate people, the child is given a rapid and desperate education by his self-sacrificing father; “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up.” The problem is that there just don’t seem too many of them left.

Affirming his belief that they are the ‘good guys’, the son enables his father to retain his integrity and undertakes to carry ‘the fire’ for the future. This is a superb, harrowing and deeply spiritual novel that touches a chord in these times of climatic change and political instability. It is a ‘must read’.

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2008-04-07