The Road – Cormac McCarthy (Audio Narrator-Tom Stechschulte)

The Road, to me, was a profound dystopian novel that mesmerized me but — and this is a big but– if I had read it in print instead of listened to it, I might not have finished it. The narration of the audio version was wonderful. The prose is slow, and dreamy, a final journey of a man and his son after the wife/mother died and the world is dusty and food will not grow but if they get to some place far away, traveling by foot, there may still be food. Every abandoned house or house with only dead people in it is a possible place to find food. But it has become a treacherous world where desperate, cruel people will capture and eat travelers. No one can be trusted. Canned food is a precious commodity, but one can be robbed. And along the way, the father passes his values to his son about the few good people, making sure he understand that they are good people and will never kill for food. They have a gun and a few bullets for self defense and a cart they pull along the road carrying all their possessions. Here and there, a town yields some clothing or a farmhouse some canned goods. The dead bodies no longer need the food. It is both a sad and hopeful novel, the hope coming from the innocence and goodness of the boy. The father, while unwilling to eat people has a more nuanced idea of good and evil, because it is too dangerous to help people. A good Samaritan might be set up by someone pretending to need help. So, it’s the two of them: The goal survival, the moral to remain as human as possible when there is virtually no reason to preserve one’s humanity. Beautifully written. Amazing characters. Sad but well worth the read. Highly, highly recommend by audio.