Country Roads Take Me Home

“You have to carry the fire.

I don’t know how to.

Yes you do.

Is it real? The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I don’t know where it is;

Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.”

The Road was an inspiring book to me, to a point that I teared up reading the last few pages of it. The novel is about the lives of a man and his son, trying to get to the sea where it’s warmer. It shows the consequences of a nuclear war, the world is dark and cold and cannibalism took over humanity. The book is very simply written with short staccato sentences, which makes it very easy to read. At the beginning the narrative structure had me lost and confused to a point that I asked myself: Why does everyone love this book so much? It’s after a quarter of the book that you get a glimpse at the true beauty of it. Simple sentences go from being annoying and misleading to flowingly easy to read. I was grasped by the story and felt like if I put the book down, someone’s going to die. I love these experiences, these bonds you form with a book and its story, and The Road perfectly made this possible.

The main focus of this book is the deep and trusting relationship between the father and the boy. The father has been the only person taking care of the boy since his mother decided to take her life, because she thought that they were just running away from death with no goal at all. The boy, being young and thin, trusts his father with all his heart. They are each other’s world entirely. A child in normal circumstances would probably have rebelled after few weeks of travelling in the frosty cold without hardly any food at all, but that’s when the relationship between the two makes a difference: The boy believes his father when he says that in the south it will be warm. Even after reaching the coast (grey water instead of blue, no ‘good’ people reunited like he hoped, no child to play with and a father that has a bad cough) the trust in his father stays alive.

The belief that keeps them alive is that they’re carrying the fire (see quote above). I thought that The Road was a unique book, written in a style I’d never seen before, and that’s what makes it special. I wish that there was a another ending to it though, just because it is so uncertain.

After reading about Pooja's ideas in her blog http://poojasivhlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/dystopian-or-post-apocalyptic-review-on.html about The Road, I was impressed by her arguments about the missing plot of the novel. Looking back I think that I was impressed by the fact that the end moved me so much, ignoring that all the same things had been happening over and over again in a different context. I enjoyed reading her blog for this exact reason: It might have changed my mind about the book. However, I think that there is no doubt that The Road is an outstanding novel, striking through by being different.