It's not a bad book, I guess; but it is a dismal one. The writing is unadorned and spare to the point of being almost nonexistent, and while there are some phrase turns here and there that are reasonably nice, the writing's not that good. Sacrilege, I know, but there it is. Some of his imagery stumbles over its own feet here and there, in his effort for an evocative image. For example...
And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the lights with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.
Now, you might read that and go "Oooh, how evocative is that?" But I was like "Hmm, sightless as the eggs of spiders?" Unconvincing, affected. He doesn't do quotation marks or much in the way of capitalization and punctuation, and the dialogue goes like this for all of it...
Did you have any friends?
Yes. I did.
Lots of them?
Yes.
Do you remember them?
Yes. I remember them.
What happened to them?
They died.
All of them?
Yes. All of them.
Do you miss them?
Yes. I do.
Where are we going?
We're going south.
Okay.
That's how all of the dialogue goes throughout it. The story's about a dying dad taking his innocent young son down a road to some supposedly better place (although where it is is unsure; they're vagabonds), hiding from cannibal tribes and other desperadoes, although like all Litfic works, this is secondary to the larger narrative. The withered-apple plot is secondary to the depiction of the ruined world, although because the man in it (he has no name we get to see, nor does his boy) isn't terribly reflective, we don't really see what he thinks of the end of the world. There's mostly a grim disappointment on the part of the guy, as he tries to keep "the fire" of civilization burning in the hearts of himself and his son, with his son offering a moral counterpoint to the father's failure to live up to his own ideals in the conditions of the world.
I found the movie to be far more affecting than the book. Maybe it's because the desultory gray tones of the movie and the acting was stronger than McCarthy's writing -- it's difficult to evocatively portray endless dreariness and doom, akin to writing a dirge, perhaps, and just sustaining that long monotone of mourning. In the movie, the horror and ugliness of the world is right up there for the taking, and draws you in, whereas in a book, the words fall flat and while the imagery is there, it is endless imagery of ash and gray and death and doom, and the lack of much to juxtapose this leaves the reader somewhat pummeled into aesthetic submission -- yes, the world sucks, we get it. Nature, red in tooth and claw, we get it. Death everywhere, got it. It becomes a parlor game of how the ongoing sameness of doom can be portrayed in novel ways.
I won't go with where he goes with it, although there is no new thematic ground covered in it, no grand insights beyond "Life's a bitch and then you die." If anybody but Cormac McCarthy had written this, it probably wouldn't have been published. It's not a bad book; it's an adequate book. Certainly not a Great Book(tm). In a hundred years, I don't think it's going to speak to people with any kind of narrative power; then again, in a hundred years, maybe nobody'll be reading books anymore--maybe nobody will be left to read'em.
