It had been on my list forever and did not disappoint.
The road is life and death: stray too far and you’re dead; but on it it’s hard to hide from the pillagers and cannibals. Also provides hope…leading somewhere.
What’s worth staying alive for when (almost) everything has been annihilated? This boy—his boy—the embodiment of innocence and goodness, whom the man is meant to safeguard even unto death.
McCarthy is an incredible storyteller but also a beautiful writer. It’s wonderful how details are revealed methodically: e.g., how long the boy and his father had been at this is, I think, not even alluded to until 200 pages into the book: “even a year ago the boy might sometimes pick up something and carry it with him for a while but he didnt do that any more.”
I think I’ll be contemplating that final paragraph for some time:
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
— ᴘ. ᴍ. ʙ.
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