Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a sparse, spare, bleak book. The narrative follows a man and his son - who are given no names and described only as 'the man' and 'the boy' - on their journey of survival across a USA blasted by some unnamed catastrophe. It is a setting familiar from post-apocalyptic science fiction films, books and, latterly, computer games and, as such, much of the setting is familiar. Whatever the disaster was, it is absolute; there seems to be no life of any kind, plant or animal, other than the few straggling survivors of humanity. Trees are dead, the sky is cold and dark - perhaps a nuclear winter, although the lack of life also suggests the possibility of some chemical poison. While in many a post-apocalyptic tale this would be important, here what has happened is an irrelevance; the characters do not consider it any more than McCarthy invites speculation. The world has ended, and the man and the boy must deal with the aftermath. 
 There is another major difference from the usual end-of-the-world fare. Whether the cataclysm is an act of man or god, weapon or nature, disease or the dead rising from their graves, these settings usually share a certain glorying in the devastation, a kind of survivalist pornography. This is not a world in which McCarthy is interested. There is no glory here, no battling against the odds. Any survival at all is tenuous and fraught. 
 And yet at the book's heart there is a thread of hope, a glimmering skein of gold in the darkness. What the novel seems to be about is a man raising his son in a world beset by depredation and despair, trying to instil morality and goodness and hope while realising he has to trust the child's own judgement; if he lies and tries to hide the evil around them he will lose the boy's belief in him. He tells the boy constantly that they are the good guys, and yet what is the boy who believes this to think when they are unable - or unwilling - to help other people? To what lengths can or should the man go to protect what is most precious to him? After all is said, is the parent sometimes protecting a child from their own fears and perhaps hiding them from hope rather than giving it to them? 
 There is horror in this book ( if no plants grow or animals live, what is there to eat? ). The tone throughout is sombre, the protagonists are filled with fear and living on the very brink of oblivion, reminiscent of the worst depredations forced on refugees everywhere. McCarthy is simply one of the most beautiful wordsmiths in the English language, his spare prose deceptively simple, sometimes delivered in an almost child-like grammar - "He stood and got hold of the door and swung it over and let it slam down and he turned to grab the boy but the boy had gotten up and was doing his little dance of terror" - interspersed with complex language and frequent pieces of almost painful beauty, and with a deftness of tone and pace that is simply unmatched. Something in McCarthy's style makes me think of Dylan Thomas at his very best, flowing and easy and poetic and beautiful, crafted with such care that the hard work is made to disappear and leave visible only the grace of the prose and the imagery.