The Road

A novel for fans of walking, looking through cupboards and lying down. It’s a Pulitzer prize winner from 2007 and widely acclaimed by jerks that you work with, or see on the bus, or wherever it is that you interact with other humans, as being tremendous and was even made into a successfully dull movie.

The truth: it sucks.

Journey alongside an unnamed father and son who basically walk around the place looking for warmth and sustenance and avoiding bad guys who are made up of cannibals, thieves and murderers. Enjoy the detailed descriptions of both male humans eating canned goods they scrounge for amongst the ruins of civilisation. Bask in your own emotional stability as you read about a suicidal man reliving the suicide of his wife as he contemplates murdering his defenceless and presumably innocent child with a firearm. Immerse yourself in the pointless details of a child’s whining to his father about the wonderful life that he can’t have while the father does his best impression of your own dead-beat dad but offering nothing but excuses. Deal with the logical flaws arising from the practical scientific difficulties with keeping captive people in a basement and somehow managing to amputate their limbs systematically yet then manage to stich up their gaping wounds and prevent enough blood loss and ward off the inevitable risk of infection without the assistance of medical implements or medication, not to mention somehow treating the dramatic symptoms of shock and pain associated with the hacking of body parts, so that they can keep their meat-donors alive as a little hidden nest of human food in their convenient underground larder.

On top of all that, the book is ARTISTIC. The author eschews quotation marks in conversation and selectively dismisses apostrophes because we need to know that things are just that little bit different. He writes in annoying, halting half-sentences, much like this particular review now that I think about it, when he repeatedly describes just how gray, dull and lifeless everything is.

And to cap it all off, the climax of this orgy of boring misery is the sight of a father abandoning his child (yeah, yeah, the dad died, but he gave up on life a hell of a lot easier than those crazy mothers with superhuman strength who can lift cars off their crushed infants) and the kid is immediately collected by a marauding group of paedophiles where he is led away to his almost certain sexual degradation followed by a painful death by way of torture and cannibalistic consumption.

Such a feel good experience that it can only be made worse by Oprah’s endorsement, a certain kiss-of-death.

This is a boring book for boring people. There is barely a plot, no character development and if you learnt any kind of moral lesson or gained any kind of insight whatsoever from reading it then you must have been starting from scratch. You can disagree with me in the comments section below and I will do my best to insult all-comers for arguing with me.