Pic courtesy Ikes, Flickr
“You
forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to
forget.”
-The
man, The Road
Today
I read Cormac McCarthy's Purlitzer-prizewinning The Road on the
exercise bike. Ironically I spent a major part of the day on the road
myself- Huddersfield Road between home and the gym. It has been a
very stupid day.
I
got up at 7am. I got ready- or at least what I thought was ready- in
a semi-awake state. I drove to the gym. I got to the changing rooms.
I realised I'd forgotten my shorts. I then forgot that I'd come in
the car. I got a bus home. I got my shorts. I got a bus back to the
gym. I went to the changing rooms again. I realised I'd also
forgotten the notebook I use to jot down records etc. I walked out of
the gym AGAIN. It was as I was walking out of the gym a second time
that I rummaged around in my sports bag checking if there was
anything else I'd forgotten. That's when I found my car keys and got
an almighty, forehead-slap-inducing flashback.
In
a state of complete disbelief as to how much of a moron I can be, I
walked back to my car and went back to my flat, got my notebook, went
back to the gym AND THEN started the workout.
This
is what you deal with when you get up earlier than you would normally
do for work and do something totally outside of your routine- you
make really dumb mistakes. Thankfully, exercise is the best way of
waking up your brain.
After
45 minutes of weights and short cardio, the synapses were definitely
firing. I finally started on the bike/book at 10:30am. I had an
hour's break for lunch. At 4pm the gym closed, and I still had the
last quarter of the novel to finish. I raced home (in the car,
thankfully) and buried my nose back in it.
The
Road is an absolutely gripping, masterful novel- beautifully written,
heart-wrenching, terrifying and totally believeable. The
post-apocalyptic scenario has been done to death in films and books,
but McCarthy brings a new level of believability to the sub-genre.
Read The Road as soon as you can.
1 comment:
There was one scene that threw me, though- the story breaks its restricted narrative structure to break off to a scene of a group of people being burned to death. Although well-written, I didn't think it felt right to leave the protagonists and show us more than them. I'd rather have found the charred, emaciated corpses when the man and the boy did.
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