When I pick up a novel I expect to savour the vicarious thrill of a cop defeating his personal demons to crack a case, or to marvel at the startling world inhabited by youthful wizards. What I don’t expect is to be reduced to emotional tears.

And yet that’s what just happened. To me! A mature man impervious to blubbing during the usual run of births, marriages and football teams winning cups.

I’d read Cormac McCarthy’s stuff before and been gripped. But in a manly way. Taut, poetical tales spun against modern Western backdrops, these are stories of men with guns and boys adopting wolves.

All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, No Country for Old Men – beautifully written stories but no preparation for his latest, Pulitzer prize-winning effort, The Road. No, he really cold-cocked me with this one.

It’s a departure for McCarthy in that it is set at a harrowing moment in the future. A man and his son are travelling along the road on foot. They have each other and nothing or no one else. The world has been reduced to an ash-covered, barren, animal-less husk where the wind howls and the frequent snowfall is grey.

Survival means scavenging for food, avoiding other humans – the bad guys, the boy calls them – who have become cannibals, and continuing on down the road. To where? Some kind of civilisation that seems pathetically implausible.

Some commentators say this is a bleak novel, but while the setting is certainly harrowing it is the tenderness and love and occasional conflict between the innocent boy and the desperate man that gives the story its redemptive power.

At on point the boy asks for reassurance that they won't eat anybody:

No. Of course not. Even if we were starving? We’re starving now. You said we werent. I said we werent dying. I didn’t say we werent starving.

The prose may just as well have been subjected to a nuclear blast along with this appalling landscape, so shorn is it of sentiment, flannel, names and even punctuation. It is what it is, a purely distilled vision, terse, easy to read but frequently hard on the imagination.

As I read this book on the bus every day, I kept thinking Please, please, please, don’t hurt them. It is unknown for me – and maybe for many other readers – to involuntarily invest so much emotional collateral in a work of fiction. But McCarthy’s novel is a profound experience – haunting, terse and unbearably beautiful in its way.

Many will read it and want to immediately re-read it. For those who find their stiff upper lips twitching, make sure you’re not reading it on the bus when you reach the final chapters.

Wow, Jago, this really reassured me- I keep dithering over whether to buy it or not as it sounds so harrowing, but the way you've written about the tenderness and the emotional heart of the novel is making me definitely want to read it now. Great review.

Hi Anna,

Funnily enough, someone else told me they didn't fancy it as sounded too bleak. But – without giving too much away – I found it a hugely rewarding story. I've just ordered a hardback copy from Amazon for rereadings!

buy it, buy it, buy it, everyone! Reviewed it some while back and STILL remain haunted by some of the images. But be warned: it's not a book to read if you're feeling a bit mis....

I started a whole new thread because I couldn't find this one. You put it much better than I did, Jago, but yes, an incredible, incredible book.

Yes, I just recommended it to my wife, who reads and writes (for Harlequin) lots of romantic fiction. At first she said, 'It's a bit depressing isn't it.' But she spent most of last night quietly, fixedly burrowing into it.

And it's being made into a film, apparently, with Viggo Mortenson. I can imagine how lurid that might be. But it might be a half-decent version of the book, you never know.

Hmm..it is very filmic, in its own way, although so much of the power is in the language, rather than the plot. But the landscape is almost like an character in itself (if you know what I mean) and I would feel drawn to watching the film to see the images in my mind made real..

I agree, Caroline. Few films are a patch on the book. And no matter how good this film turns out, the book is still very special.

The road is a love story. A father's love for his son. Fantastic.

David