The Road

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a tough read. It takes away all the action, oddity, and adventure that most post-apocalyptic novels deliver, and leaves in just the bleakness. And yet, it's really about more than that; it's about how, when everything else is gone, what you have left is your love for people, and how that alone is enough to live for.

It's the story of a father and his son, trying to survive in the ashes of our civilization. Something happened, and civilization ended, and most people just died. Most of the survivors have joined murderous gangs or insane cults. The father and his son are just traveling through the remains of our civilization. They are, they remind themselves, "The Good Guys", who "carry the flame". They struggle to find food and shelter, day after day. The son was born after the end of civilization; he has only ever known this world, and has spent his entire life only in the company of his parents. Through this hopeless, dangerous, terrible world, they keep each other going, and each is the reason the other keeps going.

I found this novel hard to put down. I read most of it today, and I don't often read most of a novel in a day. I've got a presentation to prepare for (the first presentation I'll be giving on my PhD topic), and I should have been spending my evening doing that, but instead I just read. It's a novel I've heard about often, and have been warned about the overwhelming bleakness of it, and how depressing it is to read, but that's not what I got from this book. To me, it was more about the bonds of family, and the love of a parent for their children. It's a harrowing, but it reminds you of what is important in life.

Best Served Cold

This is Joe Abercrombie's followup to his First Law trilogy, which I read a little while ago. It's a tale of revenge and redemption, in which a mercenary captain, betrayed by her employer, seeks revenge on the seven men who betrayed her. It is set in Styria, a land distant from the main action of the previous books, a few years after the first series, so there isn't too much direct effect from the events of the first story in this one.

It suffers from a common flaw of followups to popular trilogies, where a suspiciously large number of characters from the previous story happen to end up embroiled in the new plot (I'm looking at you, George Lucas). Apart from that, it's a good read - a story of seven revenge attacks could easily get repetitive and dull, but at no point does the pace of this story flag; a range of minor characters - some well rounded characters, some caricatures - kept things lively, and the main plot is sufficiently epic, twist-filled, and interesting.

The world-building in this novel is much stronger than in the previous trilogy - partly because it had already been partly done in the trilogy, but also because this story isn't spread across quite so many continents, so Abercrombie gets a chance to fill in the details. This means it feels like a story set in a real world, rather than one in which the world is merely just another prop used to move the story forward (I still can't help but compare it to A Game Of Thrones, where every minor village a character wanders through seems full of people with personalities, and each of those people has a personal history, and awareness of how they have been affected by the wider course of history).

It's an improvement over the first trilogy, and I'm getting the impression Joe Abercrombie is going to become a very good writer.