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Quite possibly the most disappointing book I have ever read. Celebrated author Cormac McCarthy ("No Country for Old Men", "Blood Meridian", etc.) has written a book about human survival in the face of ultimate adversity, and the reviews are breathlessly laudatory. So of course I just HAD to read it! So I did, but when I was done I could not help but wonder if perhaps I'd read the wrong book, or if I simply disagreed that strongly with the reviewers (evidently it was the latter). To sum up, a man and his son are wandering the road in a post-apocalyptic world. This sounds like fertile grounds for deep exploration of the themes of human character and the distinct possibility of anthropomorphic apocalypse, doesn't it? Alas, McCarthy doesn't trouble himself to address either of these highly compelling themes except in the most maddeningly superficial, oblique manner (he also doesn't trouble to punctuate enough or use quotes when characters speak, but those are annoyances that I'll leave aside). And as to the prose style? It's leaden, monotonous, and uninspired; the book consists mainly of a series of bland recitations of events. It's a bit like a dull slide show of a dull vacation taken by dull people who dully narrate what they did.
So the characters have no discernible personalities, and my desperate hunger for any detail that would make me interested in them remains unsatiated for the entirety of the book. Very few people apparently survived this apocalypse. What is it about these two that helped them survive? I have no idea. Blind luck, maybe? And what's their relationship like? Again, I have no idea, except that it consists of the boy frequently saying that he's scared and the father saying that it's OK, interrupted by episodes of the boy saying that he's hungry and the father finding food in a house or a bomb shelter that was inexplicably abandoned. I have to wonder if these two people had even met each other before this apocalypse happened. Every so often they encounter other survivors who are arbitrarily either "good guys" or "bad guys". These encounters are mildly interesting, at least as relief for the thorough dullness and shallowness of the narrative generally, and eventually one such encounter suddenly wraps up the book in a very neat and convenient, albeit a rather abrupt and haphazard, manner.
As to the apocalypse, everything is covered with ash at all times, and evidently all the plants, birds, insects, mammals, sea creatures, etc. are dead; nonetheless, a certain small number of people survived, and a certain small number of houses were left standing with food in them, conveniently awaiting discovery by "the man". There's even a boat run aground on a gray ocean chock-full of dead sea creatures, and this boat is loaded with all SORTS of valuable stuff! Wouldn't you LOVE to know anything at all about this apocalypse? I know I would! But in this I was rather bitterly disappointed. The whole premise is marred by a lingering sense of implausibility. Wouldn't an apocalypse so far-reaching as to destroy everything that it destroyed pretty much destroy--well, EVERYTHING? Maybe. Who knows. It depends.
So why do this man and this boy persist and continue walking down the road? Damned if I know. As far as I can tell they have no reason even to want to survive, they have no place to go (because everywhere is destroyed), and like everyone else who survived, they have no future.
I guess the point is that everything is empty, maybe just like human existence itself? Possibly? And maybe the reader is supposed to fill in the missing details? But those missing details would be essential to making me care about any of this, and you could say that my unwillingness to do McCarthy's job for him makes me lazy, but if I have to do his job for him, shouldn't I be the one who deserves the Pulitzer Prize for fiction?