The Road

I borrowed an audiobook version of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, and finished listening to it this week. (Recall that I read a review of it when we were at the beach.) It is a very good novel. Many of the events are frightening and disturbing (survivors who have resorted to cannibalism are a constant threat to the man and the boy who are main characters). The draw for me was rooting for the man and the boy (who must scavenge to survive but occasionally find treasures in abandoned dwellings, including a Christmas-like feast in a fully stocked emergency shelter) and wondering how they would survive hunger, cold, illness, and the bad guys.

In some very general ways it reminded me of the parts of The Lord of the Rings that describe Frodo and Sam's desperate trip to Mount Doom. The emotional and physical landscape are quite similar. (In The Road, the southeastern United States is a dead and cold wasteland.) The ending of The Road is not nearly as dramatic, but there also are the similar themes of loss and going on with life.