A father, a son, and nothing else.
Review of Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road" (2006)
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) is a brutal, bleak, soul-crushing journey through a post-apocalyptic landscape, where a father and son trudge through ash-choked ruins, scavenging for food, avoiding cannibals, and clinging to the last embers of humanity.
The novel is sparse, both in language and plot, but it’s devastatingly effective, if you have the patience for it. The Road is slow, meditative, and unrelentingly grim.
But it’s also the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was made into a movie starring the inimitable Viggo Mortensen. Even Oprah endorsed it, though one imagines her book club members were in for a shock.
No plot, no backstory, just human.
A man and his son—neither of whom are named—walk south toward the coast, hoping to escape the worst of the coming winter.
The world has been obliterated by some unnamed catastrophe, leaving behind a sunless wasteland covered in ash. There are no animals, no crops, no government. Just ruins, death, and the last scattered survivors, many of whom have resorted to unspeakable horrors to stay alive.
The father is dying. He doesn’t tell the boy this, but he knows. His only purpose is to keep his son alive, to teach him how to endure, to remind him that they are the “good guys.”
What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.
They are “carrying the fire.” What that means, exactly, is left deliberately vague, but it’s the father’s last fragile belief in human decency.
You have to carry the fire.
I don't know how to.
Yes, you do.
Is the fire real? The fire?
Yes it is.
Where is it? I don't know where it is.
Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.
There’s no grand plot. No real destination. No clear backstory about what happened to the world.
He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. He tried to remember the dream but he could not. All that was left was the feeling of it. He thought perhaps they'd come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own. Even now some part of him wished they'd never found this refuge. Some part of him always wished it to be over.
Just a father and a boy, pushing a shopping cart down an empty road, trying to stay alive while everything around them rots.
Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.
Where McCarthy shines
The Road is not an easy read. McCarthy doesn’t shy away from the horrors of a world without rules. There are disturbing scenes—truly haunting ones—that will stick with you long after you’ve closed the book. The father and son encounter horrors that most dystopian fiction only hints at, and McCarthy describes them with an unflinching eye.
And yet, it’s not violence that makes the novel so harrowing. It’s the silence. The empty landscapes.
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
The slow realisation that there is no cavalry coming, no redemption, no rebuilding of civilisation.
McCarthy’s prose is as stark as the landscape. No quotation marks. Barely any commas. Dialogue is stripped down to its essence:
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
It’s Hemingway after the apocalypse—except Hemingway, for all his restraint, never wrote something this devastating.
When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.
Yet for all its sparseness, McCarthy’s language is hauntingly poetic. He describes the ruined world in phrases that stick in your mind like splinters:
Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.
What might disappoint you
The book's relentless bleakness can exhaust you. The repetitive nature of the journey - scavenging, hiding, running - occasionally feels cyclical.
Like the atmosphere of the novel, the characters are monotone. They don't change much through the novel, except perhaps in the degree of fear they experience.
And McCarthy's stylistic choices might frustrate if you’re seeking more traditional narrative comfort.
The minimal punctuation, the absence of quote marks to delineate dialogue from narration, the unnamed characters, the repetitive dialogue – all this might get in the way of enjoying the book unless you give it your complete, undivided attention.
Finally, the ending feels like a deus ex machina, completely inconsistent with the novel's bleak tone. Perhaps, it is deliberate. Perhaps, McCarthy wants to emphasise that in a world beyond repair, it takes miracles or acts of God to rekindle any hope. But, it may be a tough sell.
The Verdict: Love and Horror, not for the weak.
The novel isn’t just about survival. It’s about love—the desperate, all-consuming love of a father for his son. The man fights, starves, and suffers just to keep the boy alive. In a world stripped of everything, their relationship is all that’s left.
And yet, The Road is also a horror novel. The world is populated with terrifying remnants of humanity—starving wanderers, marauding gangs, and people who have sunk into something much worse. The scenes of violence and despair are written with a kind of cold detachment that makes them even more disturbing. McCarthy doesn’t dwell on gore, but when he shows you the abyss, you feel it staring back.
Even the father, so desperate to keep his boy alive, must occasionally torture himself with the idea of saving the boy from the horror of the world.
Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.
There are moments—tiny, flickering moments—where hope tries to break through. The boy, despite everything, still believes in goodness. Still asks his father if they are the “good guys.” The boy is the only real innocence left in this world. He is the last proof that something good once existed. And that’s what makes the book so devastating.
Yet, for all its brilliance, The Road is also emotionally exhausting. This is not a book you read for fun. It’s a book you read to feel something primal and raw.
So, just keep some lighter reading nearby for afterward - you're going to need it.
Read Next:
If you want more McCarthy, Blood Meridian is a violent, biblical fever dream set in the American West. And his No Country for Old Men is scarier than the movie.
In other dystopia, George Orwell's 1984 will feel almost cheerful by comparison.
For civilisational collapse, try José Saramago's Blindness, Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, or Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things.
And if you’re looking for something with a similar father-son dynamic but a little less despair, try John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
In non-fiction, explore John Lewis-Stempel's Six Weeks or Sebastian Junger's Tribe for explorations of survival and human bonds under extreme conditions.