Any praise I have to heap upon Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is pointless: it’s received heaps of it, not the least of which is being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It’s a great novel, and if you haven’t read it you should. I did last year while I was on a kayak trip last year. It was bracing, and definitely different than what my co-paddlers were reading.

It’s been made into a movie, the production of which was famously troubled with a release date that shifted many times. The final trailer is out and it doesn’t look promising. I doubt I’ll be seeing it.

The novel has a cold open: the events that lead up to the novel’s setting aren’t explained or expanded upon. The reader is thrust into the middle of an unknown scenario already underway. It looks as if the movie has needlessly added background and expository information.

That’s not the worst of it though. By far the worst moment of the trailer is that moment when the words An Epic Journey flash across the screen. The beauty of The Road is precisely that the journey is not epic and there are no heroes. It’s a novel about survival, and necessity, and the basest of human needs. No one is glorified, though there is a cold nobility in the lead character’s persistent attempts to save and provide the child in the story against all odds.

There’s nothing epic about it and that is exactly what makes it such a compelling novel. Read it. Don’t see it.

Posted by skooter at 6:40 AM This entry is filed under Books.
This entry is tagged: Books, Cormac McCarthy, Movies