RaveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)... a sprawling, surreal affair, a book as strange as any he’s ever written, and reminiscent of the melancholy drift and God-haunted monologues of McCarthy’s earliest novels, published half a lifetime ago. While in precis a thriller, this isn’t No Old Country For Old Men. No gun is fired, no blade drawn from its sheath. This is more digression than headlong chase ... Almost everything about the novel’s first hundred pages generates expectations for something tough, lean and violent...And then – beautifully, mysteriously, and somewhat bafflingly – we get another book entirely ... Even while flouting expectations, McCarthy’s fundamentals remain undeniable. He’s a writer of both wonderfully taut and often very funny dialogue, and this is a book full of talk, bouncing from jokey drunk chat to near-baffling stretches of monologic erudition ... Above all else, he is a prose stylist without peer ... On almost every page some Faulknerian dazzle finds you, and while his language verges on the purple or overripe, it’s thrilling to return to writing as unashamedly biblical and rhetorical as this, when compared with the dutiful sentences and sturdy, balanced paragraphs of contemporary prose ... Less successful is the book’s occasional dabbling with mathematics and physics ... The novel comes to life most vividly when it drops this baggage and instead of gesturing towards darkness, embodies it through Bobby ... Perhaps fittingly for a book about someone driven to stasis by mourning, the book feels inside out, forever discussing people not there, matters from the past half-explained. Both Bobby and finally the book feel a little withholding, as if we’ve been granted permission to only witness loss, without directly accessing its source.
