I loved Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and No Country for Old Men, but this book didn’t work for me.
The good
- An interesting setting: the American Wild West in the 1850s. The book shows how brutal life was back then, covering topics such as battles with Native Americans (including a lot of scalping), battles with Mexico (in the borderlands between the US and Mexico), and battles with nature (e.g., bears, snakes, heat, rain).
- Some interesting characters, especially Judge Holden and Glanton.
- Occasionally beautiful, minimalist writing, in McCarthy’s unique style.
The not so good
- Very violent and dark.
- The violence has no point. Yes, I get it, that’s the point the book is trying to make, but that message comes across pretty early on, yet the book just keeps harping on it nonstop (beating the proverbial dead horse), and doesn’t offer much else. By the time the 300th person is scalped in the book, I wasn’t sure why I was still reading it.
- The main protagonist, the “kid,” is boring. He barely says anything, and just seems to go along with all the violence and horrors around him.
Overall
Reading the first 1/3rd of the book gives a taste of the setting and all the key themes of this book (mostly, how violence is pointless and bad). Reading beyond that just feels like self-inflicted violence.
