This book is as much fun as licking coal.

There’s a man, who never gets a name, poor bastard. And there’s a child who’s as talkative as an old boot. Together they’re traipsing around kicking up ash and stones, and other bleak things that scatter this distressed landscape. There’s nothing around except ruin and devastation. Perhaps there was an apocalypse, or perhaps it’s set in Hartlepool.

Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

There are bandits, and shadows, and storms, and cannibals and these two do a fairly rubbish job of avoiding each.

Believe me, I have nothing against walks, especially long ones where you get to hare around the countryside looking for, well hares. But this one is depressing. They’re not even happy when they reach the beach. They don’t do digging, or lolling about the surf, or rolling in stinky dead seals, like anyone would do at the sea side. Instead they hang around under tarpaulins staring at their shoes and crying into cold tins of beans.

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Mind you, I learned a lot about humans from reading this. They like tinned food and being warm, and they talk about ‘carrying the fire’ a lot, and I think I know what they mean. They like company too; sometimes they trust each other and sometimes they don’t. Seems like it’s a big thing, knowing who to trust and who not to.

It’s not so with us. We just sniff some behinds and get on with it. And if we find a stick we can piss on it and leave a review for others. A creatinine, chemical way of saying, ‘nice and firm, but tastes like an old battery – four out of five stars’.

Back to the book. It won a Pulitzer so obviously has deeper tides and currents at work, yet you don’t need to know what they are, just sit back and let the language take you to a world of gloom and wonder. Just be sure it will let you back out.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

If you’ve read this youself, or played the mycelial computer game that it inspired. Why not send me your own thoughts, or leave your own special review.