no country for old men cormac mccarthy book review

The son, born after the sky opened, has no memory of the world that was. It is through the voice of the father that McCarthy delivers his vision of end times. The man and boy cannot survive another winter and are heading to the Gulf Coast for warmth, on the road to a mountain pass - unnamed, but probably Lookout Mountain on the Tennessee-Georgia border. Perhaps it is the fall, but the soot has blocked out the sun, probably everywhere on the globe, and it is snowing, very cold, and getting colder. Billions of people have died, all animal and plant life, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea are dead: “At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.”Ī man in his late 40s and his son, about 10, both unnamed, are walking a desolated road. Death reaches very near totality in this novel. McCarthy has said that death is the major issue in the world and that writers who don’t address it are not serious. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.” … The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. Fire and firestorms have consumed forests and cities, and from the fall of ashes and soot everything is gray, the river water black. Color in the world - except for fire and blood - exists mainly in memory or dream. He has written a visually stunning picture of how it looks at the end to two pilgrims on the road to nowhere.

8, 2006Ĭormac McCarthy’s subject in his new novel is as big as it gets: the end of the civilized world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all. THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy | Review first published Oct.

No country for old men cormac mccarthy book review