The Road

My son lent me The Road by Cormac McCarthy recently, and I've just finished it. I'd never read any of McCarthy's books before - he'd always been one of those writers I'd put on the back burner, thinking, 'I'll get around to reading his stuff some day'.
The prospect of the imminent release of the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, an adaptation of another McCarthy book, encouraged me, so I started it straight away.
I read it in record time, for me, as I usually read much more slowly than I used to, these days, and I found myself staying up until 1am to finish it. On one level it's an easy read - the chapters are divided up into short paragraphs with a line break in between, so you can put it down, pick it up and find your place; these things matter as you get older and the brain becomes less nimble. The paperback edition I read has a few pages at the beginning of comments and testimonials from various reviews, Iand wasn't the only one who blasted through the book in record time; some read the book at a single sitting.
McCarthy writes of a post-holocaust America, at an unspecified time, though one assumes it's the near future. Life on earth has been re-imagined; the world as we know it has vanished; only a rapidly-decaying detritus remains. Names have vanished - the characters are simply 'the boy' and 'the man'. Life has been extinguished, and the fragments that remain are rapidly disintegrating and dying, as those that remain cling to life as best they can. The landscape is littered with bodies, and there is no life, only ash.
Language is mutating - unfamiliar words appear; they're vaguely recognisable, but somehow different. There's a Beckettian flavour to McCarthy's language - invented words that sound familiar, yet are strange. The man talks of things from his previous life, but the boy, born after the holocaust, doesn't know what he's talking about. It gets unbearably tense at times, as you're constantly aware of the precariousness of their hold on life
It sounds bleak in the extreme, but it isn't. It's a fearful, terrifying world, deeply strange, but utterly convincing. In spite of the horrors, love remains, and at the end, hope, of a kind, appears. It's whetted my appetite for more McCarthy, and I'm looking forward enormously to No Country For Old Men.