About the Book:

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

I have had several people tell me that this book is a must read. However, I can’t claim that it was worth my time. I have a hard time with a story that is only partially told. And this one definitely fit in that category. It is the story of a father and a son in a post apocalyptic world, that are on a quest to find the sea.  And I understand that it isn’t the journey of the story that is the issue so much as the lessons learned along the way, this book just really left me wondering.

I really struggle with a story that seams to be a snapshot, or cross section of a larger whole.  It makes it really hard for me to orient to the story, and it makes it much more difficult to identify with the characters.  And making this even more difficult is that the main characters remain nameless, non-entities beginning to end.  Simply known as “the man” and “the boy” there is very little for me to identify with in the character development.  I also found myself asking beginning to end, what happened to the world they once lived in, and how did it come to this.  And what is so important about reaching the sea?

On the positive side, however, I know that it is a book which challenges moral issues in our society — I just felt that there was a lot missing from this book.  But there are many questions that are asked, and left to the reader to make their own conclusions.  Things such as theft, murder, suicide, and the definition of a man, when everything that identifies humanity is stripped away, and we have to revert back to our origins.  I did find these questions compelling, and Mr. McCarthy doesn’t so much force his interpretation on the reader, so much as he guides the reader to their own conclusions to these difficult questions.  Frequently we encounter the issues of social justice, mercy, crime, murder, and other major issues of our day in the modern context, with all the surroundings of civility.  But what happens when we take all those trappings away?  Do men continue to act as men?

While I can’t say that I enjoyed this book, I did find the questions it asked of the reader valid, and even thought provoking.  And I also found this approach to those questions more compelling because it asks them in a context that we rarely ever consider.  What is the source of our moral values?  Is it the society we live in, or is it truly originating with us as individuals?  And can we ever know without completely removing everything that creates the superstructure of our society, so we can see what our reactions are in the most extreme of situations?

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