I finished The Road last night and I was prepared for its bleak but I wasn’t prepared for its beauty. I read the last pages while my son got his braces fitted, another torture of sorts, I only half aware of his pain so lost in the pain of the boy and his father, their walk along the road. And then in the last pages I couldn’t help but check how many I had left as the orthodontist in the far distance told my son to turn his head this way now and sorry for the bitter taste. The last paragraph came with the voiceover that he could get up, I couldn’t stand it, the beauty of what was before me, how it ends, oh my god and my son shifting in his recline, his feet dropping to the floor, my finger on the final page, the orthodontist looking over, why did this mother not care. I cried without showing it, a moment’s grace as they spoke to him a minute about after care and not eating sweets, what will happen if he doesn’t clean them properly and I read the last lines again, just to be sure I hadn’t missed something, to do it again, to be certain it’s one of the finest endings I’ve ever read. And it was, is, I wasn’t wrong, I hadn’t misread in my hurry an art of such excellence that I want to hold the book to me like my son whose mouth is now a nest of metal, his speech relearnt to clamber over wire. I’ve left it on the kitchen table where I hope the Young People will pick it up. I told them over dinner it’s about the end of the world. I’m not sure I did it justice. How could I? It has sat on my bookshelf for years, me walking past it, not daring, saying in my ignorance oh god, really? What an idiot. Read it if you haven’t read it. Read it.
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This was right on point. I’m shattered. I feel I need a few days to even process what just happened to me, in reading The Road. Question: have you watched the film?
Happens to be my favourite novel! You've picked up on exactly how I've always felt about it - that for a story of such unrelenting horror, coldness, barbarism, and hopelessness, the love quietly conveyed and the beauty of the language somehow makes the humanity at its core shine out beyond the grey hellscape the man and the boy traverse.