The Day x Connell Guides - The Connell Short Guide to Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Few, if any, modern novels have inspired as large a volume of critical writing as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It is a novel about a man and a boy trudging through a wasteland after the fall of civilisation. But McCarthy’s extraordinary achievement is to have created out of the bleakness and horror of his subject matter what Stephen Fry calls “a novel of incomparable beauty”. “The Road,” says the critic John Cant, “expresses the paradox that lies at the heart of all serious pessimistic literature: its literary passion defies the very emptiness that it proclaims.”