Six Degrees of Separation: The Road to The One Hundred Foot Journey

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. 

Normally when I participate in this my links are somewhat random. It could be locations, author names, titles, etc but this month I am going with a specific theme - mostly types of roads. Whenever I do these posts I try and keep it to books that I have actually read but there is one exception this month. It is actually an exception for two reasons but more about that later.

The starting point this month is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I read this book when it was an Oprah's Book Club selection many years ago (my review) I did think about going down the post apocalyptic route from here but in the end I decided to head in a different direction.

So the most obvious type of road other than a road is a street so I have chosen Street of Five Moons by Elizabeth Peters. This author is known more for her Amelia Peabody series which is set in Victorian Egypt. This series features a Vicky Bliss and a gentleman thief known as John Smythe. They are both fun series. My review is here.

I've realised that I didn't do a road book yet, so for that one I am choosing On the Jellicoe Road by Australian author Melina Marchetta. She is one of my favourites, whether it is her YA books which have incredible depth and emotion or her books for adults. Here is my gushy review

One of Melina Marchetta's recent books is The Place on Dalhousie. This book features characters that we met originally in Saving Francesca which is a YA novel when the characters were in late high school. We met these same characters when they are in their early twenties in The Piper's Son, which is a book I have listened to so many times. In The Place in Dalhousie they are a little older again and it was such a joy to reconnect with these characters.

Ocean at the end of the Lane by Neil Gaiman is my next stop. I read this a few years ago now, and enjoyed it. I was lucky enough to hear Neil Gaiman speak earlier this year, which was such a treat!

Now is about where I started to struggle with this idea. I mean there are plenty of books that have the word path, and there must be books with words like boulevard, parade, circuit but my restriction of having read the book made it difficult.

So I am cheating a bit and choosing as my next choice Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. I read this book 15 years ago and I do remember how much it moved me at the time.

In the end I broke my own rules and chose as my final book one that I haven't read, although I have seen the movie a couple of times because I love it. I do however have the book on my shelf. My final choice for this month is  One Hundred Foot Journey by Richard Morais. Yes, I know that there is no type of road in the title of this one, but I think the word journey encompasses all the roads.

Next month's starting book is Normal People by Sally Rooney.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A searing, post apocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

I'm pretty sure that I have mentioned here before that I used to be a regular over in the Oprah book clubs, and I know several people who are now bloggers from those groups. Reading with those groups gave me a much greater understanding of books like One Hundred Years of Solitude. Now when a new Oprah book is announced I add it to my TBR list, with the intention of joining in on the discussions on the boards. With the announcement of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I did get around to reading it, but I never did really get around to discussing on the boards.

Reading this book wasn't easy. Given the whole post apocalyptic setting, the environment is bleak, the story itself is bleak, the language is sparse. Despite the fact that it is never clear what happened to the world, it is clear that it was an event that affected both men and the natural world.

A man and his young son are travelling the road, trying to walk to the coast where they hope to find something different. There is very little interaction between the pair and other humans, mainly because it is difficult to trust anyone. There are gangs of armed people who will pretty much kill anyone they find...in some cases as a way to provide food. The man is always very wary whenever there are signs of humans, even if the person is travelling by themselves, always teaching his young son that you have to be careful who you trust.

The man tells the boy that he is carrying the light and that they are the good guys, and the young boy struggles to understand how they can be carrying the light when they are guilty of many of the things that the father says the bad people do.

As they travel along the road, close to suffering starvation, the father despairs of how to provide for his son, especially as they both suffer illness. Each time they come to a town or isolated home, a search is done through the houses and shops to see what others who have been there before them may have left behind, luckily stumbling on a couple of caches of food that help sustain them.

Upon reaching the coast though...they basically find nothing, and they will have to keep travelling.

It is a bleak story, full of griminess and at times hopelessness, but it is definitely well written, and I can definitely see why the book won the Pulitzer. The relationship between the father and the son is complex, but also compelling in its depth and closeness.

I am not sure that reading this book has inspired me to go and read more by McCarthy, although I am sure I will get to him again eventually!


Rating 4/5

Other Bloggers Thoughts:

My Own Little Reading Room
The Inside Cover
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