Who here read Cormac McCarthy's The Road?

[Draven Vertigo]

I haz questions.
Is it Sci-Fi?
Does the ending give anyone else hope?
What in your opinion was the author trying to convey about people with all the dark themes?
Did you like it? I did.

 

[Danny McG]

I read it when it was first published, it proper disheartened me and lowered my spirits.

 

[Bick]

Answers in order of the questions posed:
No. It's set in the future, but that's the only possible link to it being SF, and for me that's not enough.
Not really, it was pretty bleak.
Many humans are a bit rubbish, but some have the strength to be kind and persevere.
Actually, yes, though I'd need to be in the mood to re-read it. But then I like his prose style.

 

[Toby Frost]

Yes, it is SF because it's set in the future, much like Mad Max.
Not really, I suppose. I guess there is hope for that one boy, but not for mankind as a whole.
I didn't really think it was saying anything especially new. In desperate times, people become desperate and turn on each other, and it's a rare and good person who doesn't. This is true, but it's been said better and more enjoyably elsewhere.
I thought it was rather over-rated. I loathed the lack of punctuation in dialogue (this is a pet hate of mine) and I disliked the writing style, which seemed pretentious, as if McCarthy was trying to imitate the prose of an old bible. Like a lot of SF by "literary" writers, it seemed to be doing much the same thing that "genre" writers had done before.

 

[paranoid marvin]

I can understand both sides of the argument. Is it fiction? Yes, but there's not exactly much 'science' in there. Havng said that, a definition of 'science fiction' includes 'major social or environmental changes', so dystopias like 1984, The Road, Farenheit 451 etc. all qualify.

The movie version was well done, but it didn't feel as though it served any purpose. There was little entertainment, and by the end you felt a little like 'what was the point of that?' There are much better ways of telling a similar story - in movie version 'The Book of Eli' was similar, but much better done (imho).

 

[Venusian Broon]

I have yet to read the Road, but a lot of his work is very similar, I believe.

Outer Dark is quite apocalyptic in tone and a pretty depraved 'road novel' but set in Appalachia at the turn of the century (1900s not 2000s!). Child of God is another good one if you like him, it's got a nice horror with no supernatural elements story. I have The Road and Blood Meridian in my to read pile. Just to complete, I've also read Suttree, which is a lot lighter and moments of comedy.

I do like his writing style - it's different - when you get into the flow of not using any punctuation, I find it 'morish'.

 

[BAYLOR]

This one is one my To read list

 

[Rodders]

I want to read this too, but I suspect that I won’t due to its bleakness. I have the movie, but haven’t seen it yet for the same reason.

I don’t see why it can’t be considered Science Fiction, perhaps Horror.

 

[Vince W]

I've never read it, nor have I seen the film. To me it strays from science fiction towards science fact.

 

[hitmouse]

I have yet to read the Road, but a lot of his work is very similar, I believe.

Outer Dark is quite apocalyptic in tone and a pretty depraved 'road novel' but set in Appalachia at the turn of the century (1900s not 2000s!). Child of God is another good one if you like him, it's got a nice horror with no supernatural elements story. I have The Road and Blood Meridian in my to read pile. Just to complete, I've also read Suttree, which is a lot lighter and moments of comedy.

I do like his writing style - it's different - when you get into the flow of not using any punctuation, I find it 'morish'.

Blood Meridian is a fantastic novel.

 

[Draven Vertigo]

I read it when it was first published, it proper disheartened me and lowered my spirits.

I too read it soon after it was first published. I had read about it in a magazine that had a section of recommendations. My spirits and opinions on humanity was already pretty low at the time and this book was another reach into that particular bag of crisps for me. Haha

 

[Draven Vertigo]

I want to read this too, but I suspect that I won’t due to its bleakness. I have the movie, but haven’t seen it yet for the same reason.

I don’t see why it can’t be considered Science Fiction, perhaps Horror.

Fair enough. I mentioned it in one of my creative writing classes. Taking care to watch people's expressions and general enthusiasm diminish. It's pretty dark and those in class claimed they could only do one read through.

 

[Draven Vertigo]

I want to read this too, but I suspect that I won’t due to its bleakness. I have the movie, but haven’t seen it yet for the same reason.

I don’t see why it can’t be considered Science Fiction, perhaps Horror.

Oh it could definitely approach the horror genre at parts. I appreciated the ideas that without our modern conveniences people devolve into tribalism, rape and cannibalism. Just look at what happens when you take away someone's iPhone for a spell. They lose their minds ‍

 

[Mr Cairo]

Never read the book but myself and my wife watched the film in 2010 and found it to be a bleak, depressing but compelling film, please take into acccount that at the time ourt son was about 9, the moment we watched the Dad in the film show the son the correct method for killing himself with a gun in the mouth really really got to us.

We finished the film and then had to watch a few episodes of friends to get past it. Chilling film if your a parent.

after that I never wanted to read the book.

 

[Randy M.]

I haz questions.
Is it Sci-Fi?

Yes. McCarthy is vague about the cause of the apocalypse, but it seems to stem from man-made disasters. I suspect McCarthy, old enough to remember the end of WWII, the bombing of Hiroshima and especially the long, traumatic Cold War that left an indelible mark on at least one generation, probably was drawing on those memories and extrapolating what the fall of civilization would look like.

Does the ending give anyone else hope?

Yes. Of a sort. Throughout the father is shown as timid. In trying to protect his son, he avoids other people, and tries to buffer his son from the world as it is. The son is actually less timid. It could have cost him his life with the cannibals, but their isolation eventually kills the father. At the end, the son looks to have been adopted in by someone less paranoid. Maybe he'll become a family's meal, but that isn't the tone of the man's approach to the boy. Still, McCarthy doesn't commit, so you have to draw your own conclusions.

What in your opinion was the author trying to convey about people with all the dark themes?
Did you like it? I did.

I liked it -- it is beautifully written -- but it's not an easy read and not one I'd tackle again without much forethought.

 

[Ray Zdybrow]

It's science fiction. It extrapolates a future world which is an inevitable result of our technology (in a broad sense, rather than "tech" as in gadgets) and how we have to deal with that world. Bleak... although I don't believe it is (yet) inevitable, or that most people would deal with it in such a way...

 

[Extollager]

I'd call it sf, sure, but have no problem with someone wanting to uphold a more restrictive definition of sf than mine that would exclude this. But if I were still teaching, and were putting together a science fiction elective, I might well include this as an assigned text.

It's a while since I've read it, but my memory is that the father talks to the son about being a person of the fire, meaning some spiritual principle or inner presence. The sense I got was definitely not of a Christian outlook, but of a Gnostic one: there are fleshly people, not redeemable, and who belong in a dark world like this; but here and there, there are spiritual people who do not belong in this wretched material world in which they are "caught." The task of the spiritual is to realize what they are and endure this dark world till they are reunited with the world of light from which their being derives. There's nothing in the book that spells all this out, and I don't mean I think McCarthy is a Gnostic plain and simple; but that, it seems to me, is the character of his imagination in this novel at least. If I'm right about this tendency, then the "hope" in the book is not that somewhere people will start civilization over again, etc., but that the boy has found other bearers of the light, his proper people, and whether they live for years yet or not is not really the point. They know they are creatures who do not eat people.

The sense I get is that the catastrophe of the "shear" effects an apocalypse in the literal sense of that word, i.e. a revealing, an unveiling, of the way things really are.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I wouldn't really class The Road as SF. Although it's post-apocalyptic, and there's been no apocalypse so it must be the future, there's nothing else about the book that otherwise references anything about the future - except, perhaps, that there is no future! Additionally, it avoids common elements of SF genre fiction such as plot or character development, and the ending is a typical literary one where nothing is actually resolved. People move through a landscape that is familiar to people today, except that civilization has collapsed, and that's pretty much it, without any attempt to make insightful observations or commentary on that setting, and the book in general doesn't really attempt to say anything.

 

[Extollager]

It’s quite a lot like Lord of the Flies, isn’t it?

 

[Vertigo]

I read it some many years ago and like it a lot. My thoughts are on Goodreads: Mike Franklin's review of The Road