The Road
By: Cormac McCarthy / Narrated By: Tom Stechschulte
Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
Sucker punched? Not quite. Shattered, cripes yes…
So, like, just finished The Road, and I have to admit that tho’ Cormac McCarthy is a fave author of m’ husband, I’ve totally managed to get 55 odd years of life on the planet without so much as reading a single work of his. But this is a Fave of an Accomplice, so I began this apocalyptic tale feeling all tickled pink.
Screeeeeech! Brakes on!
Cuz from the get-go McCarthy is swinging hard, and boy is he swinging low. Swirling ash, a man and his son, a skeletal young boy, are trudging through a landscape of ash and horrors, pushing an unwieldy shopping cart with all their possessions tucked into it. Not that there’s much to cart around, and god knows they wish it was heavier with, say, food, say, drinkable water. It’s pretty danged cold out, so it’d be nice if they had warmer clothing, more blankets.
The pair are sticking to the road, a devastated interstate in a devastated landscape; the man knows they will not be able to survive another winter in such environs, so it’s south south south that they’re headed. As they walk, the man considers the single weapon they have, a gun with but two bullets in it. To protect them from marauders? Or one for the boy, one for the man? Nothing is guaranteed in this new hell, better the way that the woman went: dead dead dead. A motherless boy left behind to cling to the man who, natch, is on his last legs. Can he leave his son behind should he die? Or is it better to shoot the boy, cradle his body in arms that are losing strength, all before he uses the final bullet for his own head?
-OR-
To end it before the cannibals catch them.
Cuz see, McCarthy is SUCH a chipper kinda guy, of COURSE there’ve gotta be cannibals in here, right?
Tho’ mankind is almost extinct, he ain’t all the way gone yet. Those who remain will do whatever has to be done to survive, steal, kill, eat. And through it all are the sometime whimsical exchanges between a boy who’s good right through his soul, and a man who wants to give the boy a chance to feel something good, to NOT see what’s around them, to keep the boy’s essence pure and capable of taking each step, keep going, NOT think of a land, a life, without Hope. To walk and walk and walk, conversations that there’s a Somewhere Where Life Will Be Better, even as the man coughs until blood is spat out.
I’m just gonna say it: This ENTIRE week of Listening had me jumpy about narrators for all and sundry reasons. Here in The Road I was twitchy cuz Tom Stechschulte is at the helm, and that? Well, Jiminy H. Freaking Crickets, he just so happened to be narrator of one of my most LOATHED audiobooks of all time. In THAT one, the author was smug, condescending, he jeered at people who maybe weren’t as glib about taking an animal’s life as he himself was. And Stechschulte soooo put the smugness, the condescension, the jeering notes in his delivery. Cripes, I DETESTED the author by the end. But oh goodness how AWEsome was Stechschulte here. Just the right detachment as we’re introduced to a scorched planet, a gray landscape with charred and mummified corpses here and there; remnants of a world the man knew but that the boy never did. For a novel where no names are given, Stechschulte fleshed each character out well, the man-eaters as well as our heroes; an old man ready for death as well as our pair as they discover caches of food to help them live another day, help them take further steps into a bleak future. If I had ANY hesitation re: p’raps always hearing despised author of note, they were dismissed almost immediately. PERfect narration!
Yeah, this was my last Listen of the week, but it was my favorite. Kinda odd to say that the story is good, considering it’s starkness, but sooo well-written, depraved without being obscene, gentleness to be seen between the man and the boy, esPECially when the conversations between them start taking on tones of hopelessness, where we see that the boy is well aware of the horrors, of how tenuous their existences are, of how things canNOT be Unseen.
Plus, a Happily Ever After Cormac McCarthy Style… which means?
Gutted; I’m well and truly gutted.
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