Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco
Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest
literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has
written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the
bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly
dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a
post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read
this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we
asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak
and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his
glowing review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a
cult following with his series about private investigators
Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense
and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the
mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado,
his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).
Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a
post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world
in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not
only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands
of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human
stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and
dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the
definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this
recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers,
it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off
the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across
this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an
unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age
of ten. It is the love the her feels for his son, a love as
deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of
McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of
mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that
greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs
between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here
the love of a desperate her for his ly son transcends all
else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light
and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world,
while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight
running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost
out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final
affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more
shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of
his her's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man
and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all
things: faith. --Dennis Lehane
The Road is now a major motion picture based on the novel by
Cormac McCarthy, starring Academy Award-nominee Viggo Mortensen,
Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Enjoy these images from the film, and click the thumbnails to see
larger images.