Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ charts the journey of a man and his son across a dystopian America that has become an apocalyptic wasteland, this coast to coast trek mirroring McCarthy’s personal move. Despite the setting the main object of struggle in the dystopia is battle with the environment as cold, wind and storms tries to kill the man and the boy. Beyond this there is no context for this journey, the book is extremely frustrating as the boy will be injured and the man force him to keep walking, or they find a stocked bunker and just take some and leave as they have a journey to make, but the point of this journey is never addressed and its the most repetitive and uneventful plot of ‘nearly starving, finds food in some miracle, somehow ends up losing food, keeps walking for no reason’… 

Really the main failure of ‘The Road’ was its characterisation. It didn’t start well in not naming the two protagonists and therefore already giving the reader less to root for, but then the book is primarily told through their dialogue and it is the most poorly written and dull conversation. I’m not sure how old the son is supposed to be but he just asks the same basic questions and repeatedly answers only ‘okay’ or ‘I’m scared’, but generally the fathers answers are pretty flat and whilst the sons innocence comes through his sheer acceptance of whatever he is told and ignorance creates such a terrible conversational dynamic, and when most of the book is told through these conversations it just becomes bad writing. 

Really don’t see the acclaim for ‘The Road’ as regarding the spectre of the dystopian genre the world building is really weak and stereotypical and the stakes are dead and buried, and for a book that is supposedly driven by the intensity of familial love this too felt nearly non-existent.