Book Review: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Manu Larcenet

In the opening of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Manu Larcenet, there isn’t much road to be seen. Instead, there is ash from some unknown cataclysm, and the constantly falling gray-black snow that covers the road and all who attempt to travel it. All is bleak and dire as an older man travels through the apocalypse with his son (probably around 11 to 13 years old). Their lives are one of constant searching: food, water, oil, shelter. Early on, when they discover a waterfall and pond to bathe in, we are struck by how emaciated the two are: skin and bones is a perfectly scary and accurate description. They have been on the road for awhile, and it is not going well.

As it seems with most post-apocalyptic literature, it is nearly impossible to find people who can work together. Instead, one shitty group of people after another coalesces to bring horror to all the other groups. There are people who kill so they don’t have to share food, and there are people who kill people for more food – both the food carried in bags and the food carried on their bones. Nobody can be trusted, adding to the fears the father has for the future of his son. How to get him to relative safety? How to care for him effectively in blizzard conditions? But the father keeps putting one foot in front of another, keeps providing for his little boy.

“Whoever touches you I kill,”the father tells the son. He constantly has to reassure the son that they are the good guys because they would never eat another person no matter how close to starving they have come. They are given a brief respite when they find a food cellar with a running shower and beds in the barn of an old farmhouse. But the old man is extremely worried about the “bad guys” who have a serious foot patrol on the road. Adding to all this is the worrisome cough the father is fighting with little success.

The illustrations are beautiful in their depictions of a grim apocalypse. Even a simple box of aspirin conveys loneliness and desperation. The dialogue is sparse and terse and heartfelt between father and son. Ridiculously thoughtful and dramatic art throughout, Larcenet favors the dark grays and blacks that depict a post-apocalyptic world, but it is the bright whites, in your face and stark in a sea of despair that jump out at the reader. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Manu Larcenet is a stellar adaptation of McCarthy’s brilliantly bleak novel.