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McCarthy never simplifies nor does he elaborate upon its reality but confronts it with stark honesty. Such reverberations are the stark reality of death. At times the reality hits and its reverberations hit home. McCarthy’s prosaically beautiful lament lulls the reader into a security. The words are as bare and as naked as the landscape which encapsulates the characters, as this encapsulates the reader.

McCarthy’s ability to transfix the reader on the two companions’ mundane life, his ability to grip the reader in a novel where the outcome is painfully real and set in motion merely proves his prowess as a writer. McCarthy has described how both are ‘each other’s world entire.’ In his dedication of ‘The Road’, McCarthy writes to John Francis McCarthy, his own son, and it is this raw and steadfast love within this relationship that lies at the very heart of the novel. ‘We’re the good guys’, the boy reiterates, his mantra to survive. Their exchanges are sparse and limited but there remains the paternal that survives beyond the pages of the novel.

The father’s energy and fears are directed towards their search for food whilst the boy looks to his father, equally afraid, as a source of support, a foundation. There is an underlying streak of love and the hope that even on the road to their inevitable demise, there will be a solution, an antidote to the protagonists and their troubles. ‘The Road’ is not entirely bleak and ominous. I felt my eyes sting with tears as McCarthy described the father’s undying affection for his son: ‘He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.’ Whilst every sentence is measured and crafted, moments of intimacy between father and son strike one down with amazement. The language is restrained and simplistic yet on an epic, biblical scale. Such is the power of McCarthy’s formidable accomplishment as a writer. The small wad of burning paper drew down to wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes. Yet equally, juxtaposed against the raw terror are images of untamed beauty and wonderment: A father and his young son travel through the ravaged remains of America, experiencing the unimaginable sense of hunger, those who turn to savagery to survive and the continual fear that the next day of monotony and hardship will present an insurmountable obstacle. The vision created within ‘The Road’ is bleak and foreboding. It are stifled and ignored, perhaps more than ever a view of a post-apocalyptic world is needed to shake us out of our complacency.