A father and son push a shopping cart along a broken concrete highway. The sky and landscape are gray and desolate. Nuclear holocaust? Armageddon? We can assume but are never told. Father remembers what it was like before. The son has known only this world of ash and danger and survival. What happened to the father’s wife and son’s mother? We think we know but even that is left to the imagination.

As father and son head for the coast – we don’t know why – they carry scavenged food, anything they can find for warmth, and a handgun. The rule is there must always be two bullets left. We find out why when they almost fall into a trap at what seems to be a deserted farmhouse.

Bleak. Despairing. Sparse. And yet The Road is a story of love and faith. The bond between father and son is inspiring and offers glimmers of hope in the midst of the gray tones.

This is a road and journey I highly recommend you take.

I read The Road before Oprah (along with the people who made the movie No Country for Old Men) took Cormac McCarthy mainstream. But not by much. I must confess in my years of reading and spending time in the book publishing industry, I somehow missed McCarthy as a brutal, unrelenting force in American fiction. Some would argue that he is the greatest living American novelist and this is his greatest novel.

One warning on McCarthy’s style. As mentioned, his writing is sparse. It took me a little while to get used to the fact that he doesn’t use quotation marks in his dialog, and he doesn’t care much for commas either. I think there is a little something Ernest Hemingway in his tone and style.

After The Road, I did go back and read a number of his other works, including Blood Meridian, which I thought was the best of his novels I read. It is a true classic. The portrait he draws of the Devil in human flesh in the last scene is as terrifying as anything you read from Dante – but that’s a different road to cover at a later time.

 

I like Science Fiction just fine but must not love it because there have been many years I didn’t read even a single SciFi title. I had read a few of the standards over the years without much prompting and recommend them all – Frank Herbert’s Dune Series, Philip Dick’s Valis Trilogy and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (became the movie Bladerunner), Asimov’s I, Robot, Ray Bradburry’s Farenheit 451, Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Arthur Clarke’s 2001: Space Odyssey, C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet trilogy, and I’m sure others.

My son Merrick introduced me to Orson Scott Card and his child genius Andrew Wiggin – Ender – in Ender’s Game. A slow start – probably because of my own low expectations – and an ending that was so unexpected that it made me want to read the book again. Immediately. I’ll leave it at that so I don’t even stray towards a spoiler. My reading of preferred genres goes in streaks I admit, but I devoured all the books in Card’s series as quickly as I could get to them: Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and I’m sure I’m leaving something out. (Thanks Merrick!)

Ender grows up in a home with a cruel older brother, Peter, and the love of his life, Valentine, his older sister and the only one who doesn’t seem to resent his brilliance. Card does have an ability to see the future – his description of communication over the Internet before Al Gore had the thing really up and going is amazing – and in a world of overpopulation Ender wasn’t even legally allowed to be born. Peter and Valentine are both eligible to be selected for Battle School but Peter’s anger turns to lethal hatred when it is Ender who is chosen to train as a fighter to repel a hostile alien forces’s next invasion.

My description may make this sound trite but the psychological, moral, and physical conflicts are brilliant and emotionally exquisite. [Note: The movie was made after I read the novel. It just didn’t capture the psychology of the book.]

Like Frank Herbert in the Dune books, as you read through Card’s series you find an author who doesn’t just create other settings or even worlds – but whole cosmologies complete with religions, races, histories, and complex moral dilemmas, including definitions of the soul and consciousness. (Yes, there are some slow sections, particularly in Xenocide, but the whole experience is more than satisfactory.)

Just a note or two about Card. He is a descendent of Brigham Young and graduated from BYU and the University of Utah, and did doctoral work at Notre Dame. He served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While passing through Salt Lake City on a Delta flight I saw that he has also written the novels Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel and Leah, which are known as the Women from Genesis Series. The Internet says he lives in North Carolina now. I don’t know anything about his ongoing personal religious life but would simply observe that as with other author’s from a high identity religious background, there is a discipline and training of thought that seems to spawn a counter-intuitive imaginative freedom with the ability to dream up huge, comprehensive, and interconnected realities as he’s done in his Andrew Wiggin novels.