The Road... to nowhere?

An hour or so after finishing Cormac McCarthy's The Road I'm still not sure what I thought about it, or whether it's provoked much of a reaction in me at all. Which is, I think, kind of the point. It was A Good Read: improbably pacy and engaging, not nearly as depressing as I'd feared and well written in McCarthy's perfectly serviceable style.

And yet. If I hadn't been told how brilliant it was I don't think I'd be thinking of it at all. If I didn't know it had won a Pullitzer Prize I think I would have said to myself, probably not aloud, "oh that was good" and then put it back on my bookshelf. Instead I'm forcing myself to write something about it because, so everyone tells me, It Is An Important Book.

Is it though?

Having a Father who reads and owns a lot of science fiction I've read quite a bit in my time. I grew up loving stories of post-apocalyptic worlds, in books and onscreen and although the debate on whether this book qualifies on that front I'm not entirely sure what it is that sets this book apart from every other post-apocalyptic book I've read and enjoyed and then forgotten.

Could it be the nature of the post apocalyptic world? The cannibals? The ash? The symbolism of the road? Eh, I think not: nothing that hasn't been covered endlessly in books and films. The themes of isolation, hopelessness etc? Pah, nothing I didn't read in Z for Zachariah as a teenager (and at least that book was a little sexy). The father-son bond? Of course because it's SUCH a rarity see the bond between parent and child revered,right? right? Vomit. So then is it the quality of the writing? Well... maybe. I quite like McCarthy's style, mostly. He has some occassionally breathtaking similes and some dazzling turns of phrase but the simplistic sentences and the endless conversations bereft of quotation marks do get a little wearing. Nothing I would care to read, say, 500 pages of, instead of 200-odd.

In the book's defence it's not that I didn't lilke it. I did. It was interesting, well written and enjoyable. I wouldn't read it again but I might recommend it to someone else if they liked that kind of thing. It's a good book, maybe a very good book. But is it (to take some random quotes from the inside dustjacket of my copy) "a masterpiece that will soon be considered a classic", "a work of such terrible beauty that you will struggle to look away" or "the first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation"?

Well not for me it isn't.