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ORIGINAL: Woger


I got Blood Meridian last August and still only about two thirds through it, couldn't get into it at all, Ridley Scott is filming this isn't he?. I must get The Road (hey Oprah endorsed it), Child of God is supposed to be good also.

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ORIGINAL: Rob

Well I've only read The Road and No Country... and neither have so much of a speech mark to be found.  I read the Road first and thought the lack of puncuation was some sort of comment / reflection about how society had disintegrated.  Then I read No Country for Old Men and realised I'd been talking out my ar*e .

However, it didn't annoy me and you do get used to it.

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From What Are You Reading?

ORIGINAL: JV

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ORIGINAL: Felix
A great read. Though I think I'm going to get a pen and starting putting the fucking speechmarks in myself...

I managed quite happily without them. You don't really need them to be honest, and although I can't remember how he puts speech in his other novels, here it was quite representative of the situation. Throughout the book there are numerous 'errors' such as apostrophes missing, 'Spanish' written with a small s, etc. To me it represented the breakdown of civilisation because after all the written word was barely even relevant anymore since no one writes anything so why bother about the accuracy? That's just my opinion though and even without that interpretation I could still live happily without the speech marks.

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ORIGINAL: richCie
anyway to reply to JV, I read an article by an enviromentalist on this book where he says that he has just read the most important book about climate change ever, to paraphrase 'this book contains no facts, no figures, no graphs, no models, no predictions' and then he goes on to say that it higlights the possible end of the world in a way that no one else has been able to do. So that person for one thinks it is global warming, or perhaps it is a nuclear war, possibly sparked by global warming, or oil crisis. In the end it doesnt matter what the cause is, this book is simply saying, "this is what we will do to ourselves, unless we address our problems now".

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ORIGINAL: crayon


Kenny, I waited about 4 months to read NCFOM because I loved the film as well and it worked out alright for me.  The book is better though!

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ORIGINAL: BigKovacs

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ORIGINAL: richCie
anyway to reply to JV, I read an article by an enviromentalist on this book where he says that he has just read the most important book about climate change ever, to paraphrase 'this book contains no facts, no figures, no graphs, no models, no predictions' and then he goes on to say that it higlights the possible end of the world in a way that no one else has been able to do. So that person for one thinks it is global warming, or perhaps it is a nuclear war, possibly sparked by global warming, or oil crisis. In the end it doesnt matter what the cause is, this book is simply saying, "this is what we will do to ourselves, unless we address our problems now".

I'm pretty sure it's a nuclear holocaust. The cataclysm seems to kick off properly when the kids born so if he's 8 or 9 in the story that would give enough time for a nuclear winter to kick in, it's not enough time for the environment to completely fail and produce the landscape they travel across. Either way, like all good post-apocalyptic stories the main cause is hinted at and never fully revealed. Proper to McCarthy.

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ORIGINAL: JV

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ORIGINAL: Rob

Well I've only read The Road and No Country... and neither have so much of a speech mark to be found.  I read the Road first and thought the lack of puncuation was some sort of comment / reflection about how society had disintegrated.  Then I read No Country for Old Men and realised I'd been talking out my ar*e .

However, it didn't annoy me and you do get used to it.

Same here! Kinda.... Cos I read All The Pretty Horses a few years ago but couldn't remember whether the speech was the same or not. It doesn't bother. However what you said about the disintegration of society had made sense to me too, and I noticed quite a few little 'errors' through the book - anyway this is what I posted in the What Are You Reading? thread in response to a post by Felix:

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From What Are You Reading?

ORIGINAL: JV

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ORIGINAL: Felix
A great read. Though I think I'm going to get a pen and starting putting the fucking speechmarks in myself...

I managed quite happily without them. You don't really need them to be honest, and although I can't remember how he puts speech in his other novels, here it was quite representative of the situation. Throughout the book there are numerous 'errors' such as apostrophes missing, 'Spanish' written with a small s, etc. To me it represented the breakdown of civilisation because after all the written word was barely even relevant anymore since no one writes anything so why bother about the accuracy? That's just my opinion though and even without that interpretation I could still live happily without the speech marks.

Anyway I was very touched by the book. I read a book once called something like Into The Woods (not really sure of the title) about 2 girls who end up living in the woods after something terrible happens in the rest of the country... However they had the woods to live on, whereas in The Road the survivors don't even have that. There is no natural food left as everything is dead, burned or contaminated (or all three!) so the whole thing from start to finish is very bleak and devoid of hope. Sure, the kid joins a family but eventually every source of food in the continent will have been consumed and then what will they do? There aren't even any animals - the only one they come across is the sound of a dog barking which didn't last long. They will all have to resort to cannibalism for survival or starve to death.

What do you think happened for the WHOLE continent to be so completely destroyed? It sounds as if it was a global event since no one from outside America seems to have come to restore civilisation in the years since it happened. I know there is ash, I don't know if it was nuclear fallout or not, but for everything everywhere to be so burned everywhere. That continent is about 3,000 miles across so while a nuclear bomb is big, would one do the job of wiping everything out everywhere?

Anyway, I thought this was an excellent book. I absolutely raced through it, which surprised me - I had found All The Pretty Horses quite hard to get into (but a good read nonetheless) so I had expected The Road to be similar. These are the only McCarthy books I've read.

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Also, the ending was a little convenient. The kid was on his own for about half an hour before being rescued.

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ORIGINAL: Jim

I didn't know anything about a film until today. Viggo Mortensen isn't who I would've imagined as the man, but he's certainly not the worst choice. I've got my own strong image in my head of the book, so I'll be curious to see more of the film.