I am currently reading The Road, Cormac McCarthy's latest novel (first published in 2006). Simply put, it is the best fiction I've read in the last few years.
It's about a father and son's journey through an extremely bleak post-apocalyptic America, where a catastrophe has destroyed nearly all life, and where its remnants are reduced to cannibalistic savagery. The father and son are making their way south along a particular road, presumably a former interstate road. Along the way, they meet with various atrocities, including a person who is kept alive while his limbs are cut off bit by bit to feed other people.
Father and son are "each the other's world entire." McCarthy's prose is such that you can feel the bleakness and hopelessness that he describes. You can feel the black rain beating down on you and chill your bones right down to the marrow, you can feel yourself trudging through the ash-covered snow, your boots sinking in the ground and wetting your feet.
About the warmest things in the book (so far) are the sparse conversation between father and son, never more than a few lines at a time, often terse, and sometimes filled with anger and despair. By not using the usual punctuation (he does not use quotation marks for the dialogues, and eschews apostrophes; doesn't becomes doesnt), he makes the prose seem even more stark and realistic.
The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. It's been adapted into a movie starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron. It was released in the USA last month. There is buzz it could be an Oscar contender.
The official trailer for the movie can be viewed on Youtube (embedding disabled by request).
Sigh...what am I gonna do when I finish reading the book?
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