Replete both with bleak violence and acute suspense, a layered, tightly constructed narrative that partakes of the epic virtue it attempts to abnegate. The father is visited as poignantly and dreadfully as Odysseus or Aeneas by ghosts. I think ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road is best understood. McCarthy has to be accounted as a secret master and the rightful heir to the American Gothic tradition of Poe and Lovecraft. For naturalism operating at the utmost extremes of the natural world and of human endurance a McCarthy novel has no peer. There are strong echoes of the Jack London-style adventure Robinson Crusoe. That book is usually viewed not only as McCarthy's greatest-a view I passionately share-but as representing a kind of fulcrum. 'Fundamentally it marks not a departure but a return to McCarthy's most brilliant genre work, combined in a manner we have not seen since Blood Meridian adventure and Gothic horror. His novels are full of marvelous depictions of birds in flight, and The Road has a gorgeous paragraph like something out of Hopkins. In his best pages one can hear Melville and Lawrence, Conrad and Hardy. When McCarthy is writing at his best, he does indeed belong in the company of the American masters. devotion to detail, his Conradian fondness for calmly described horrors, his tolling fatal sentences, make the reader shiver with fear and recognition. It poses a simpler question, more taxing for the imagination and far closer to the primary business of fiction-making: what would this world without people look like, feel like? These questions McCarthy answers magnificently.

The Road is not a science fiction, not an allegory, and not a critique of the way we live now, or of the-way-we-might-live-if-we-keep-on-living-the-way-we-live-now. The new novel will not let the reader go, and will horribly invade his dreams, too. The Road is a much more compelling and demanding book than its predecessor. 'Despite Cormac McCarthy's reputation as an ornate stylist, The Road represents both the logical terminus, and a kind of ultimate triumph, of the American minimalism that became well-known in the 1980s under the banner of 'dirty realism'.

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