The Road by Cormac McCarthy is probably the best book I’ve ever read. If not the best, top three easily. It’s a relentlessly realistic portrayal of the end of the world, and a father and son’s trip to the coast and south. They’re not going to the coast because they know things are better there; they’re going because they know it can’t get any worse than where they are. What caused the end of the world is never mentioned, aside from a truly memorable sentence thrown in at a seemingly innocuous place: “There was a sheer white light, and a series of low concussions.” That’s it. It’s a sentence that’s full of menace, because you don’t know what the light and the concussions are, or what caused them. All you know is the world has been reduced to ash. Ash floats in the air, coats everything, falls like snow. The portrait you get is that of a black and white world. White and gray ash everywhere, with black, dead trees sprouting up.

Roving bands of looters and cannibals roam the land, looking for food. There is no humanity left. After the end, people were reduced to their basest instincts. No one has a name. There’s no point in names anymore. The child was born after the world ended, and it’s all he’s ever known. His father is tasked with teaching the boy how to live in this cruel world, and telling him about the way things used to be, before. Finding a can of Coke is a rare glimmer of the old world, as is visiting the house in which the father grew up. The smallest good fortune, like the Coke can, seem like the best things in the world compared to the desolate despair that pervades every other second of their lives. There are plenty of horrifying situations in this world: babies roasting on spits for food, cellars full of dismembered naked people, their limbs having been cut off for their masters to consume.

In case you haven’t read the book, I won’t ruin everything. It’s a harrowing read, one you won’t want to do if you’re depressed, but the prose is magnificent, matching in tone the world it portrays, and while there’s not much that actually HAPPENS to the characters, the bond between father and son is portrayed perfectly, and you care deeply about each of them. By the time the ending happens, you’re in tears. Speaking of the ending, it is the perfect end to a nearly perfect journey. I read this book shortly after it came out, and when I heard they were making it into a movie, I was both excited and terrified. The book doesn’t lend itself to a movie, and I was worried that Hollywood would come in and wreck its mood, turning it into a slightly harder version of 2012.

I saw the movie this weekend, and I was actually impressed. The landscapes they found to try to match the tone of the book are very impressive, and I believed wholeheartedly that this was the world described in the book. That said, even these otherworldly ghost-scapes could not match the intense darkness of the book. Some color seeps in, which I didn’t feel like existed in the book. I had mixed feelings about the voiceovers as well. I thought the movie spoke for itself, and didn’t need Viggo Mortensen to tell us what was going on. That said, the voiceovers were some of the best passages from the book, and I’m glad that people who saw the movie and didn’t read the book got to hear them. I was disappointed that the “sheer white light, and series of low concussions” was voiced over instead of shown. I would have loved to see the bedroom light up and hear “boom boom boom” in the distance.

The increased presence of the mother, who was barely in the book, was not as bad as I thought it would be. Her scenes served as a reminder of better times, and a devastating story of what the end of the world drives people to do. Most of the important scenes from the book are present here, with a few added or expanded on that actually add to the story. One scene in the beginning has a family hanging from the rafters. The boy asks his dad why they killed themselves, and he replies “You know why.” Scenes like that, coupled with powerful scenes of the father showing the boy how to shoot himself in the head, and the fantastically disturbing aforementioned “basement human meat” scene, serve to illustrate just how bad things are, since McCarthy’s descriptive prose is absent in the movie.

The acting is across the board excellent, from the main two characters to the surprisingly high profile supporting characters. Robert Duvall in particular is astounding, partly because you can’t even tell it’s him until halfway through his screen time, he’s so haggard and devastated looking, and partly because he takes a character that was ever so briefly in the book and turns it into the most interesting person they meet along the way. And the ending that was so pitch perfect in the book is largely intact here, which I was so grateful to see. They did alter it slightly to take some of that wonderful ambiguity out of it, but they didn’t change it into a “everyone lives happily ever after” affair that would have negated the whole thing. Overall, I was pleased with what they were able to do with a book that by all accounts shouldn’t have ever been attempted to make into a movie. Not perfect, but faithful, and an extremely solid effort. I do think that, even though the movie isn’t as good as the book, it helps to have read the book before seeing the movie. Really, though, my point here is just this: Read The Road. It’s awesome. Then, see the movie. Just not if you’re depressed, or you like romantic comedies.