They should make Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” compulsory reading for every politician of every hue in every country. Right now. For all their protests, groups like Greenpeace would do well to buy a few copies and mail them out to Presidents, Prime Ministers and Dictators with a simple instruction: ‘Read this!’.
It is the most bleak novel I have ever read; a no-holes-barred picture of a post-apocoalyptic world which is so unrelentingly tortuous that you feel it has to be close to what it might actually be like. No-one should have to worry about finding out for real.
As I read, I dreaded turning the next page for fear of what might happen to the characters. I didn’t want the finish reading the book because I knew there would be something unpleasant and hopeless at the end. You know this is no fairy tale; there can be no happy ending.
Remarkable.
Ian Gouge - Writer 