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** spoiler alert **
There are lots of things to like about this book, like its vivid language, its rich themes and the judge's rather profound digressions into extemporaneous expositions about geology and human nature. It is filled with lots of little moments and scenes that come alive and really transport the reader to another place. But as a whole, the novel is pretty flawed, and it really doesn't have a plot to speak of until you get to the very end. If I had to sum it up, I would describe it as a short story with a novel-length prologue. Nevertheless it actually ends quite strong, surprisingly.

While it has many positive elements that make it worthy of being called a great work of literature, plot and character development are not among them. I'm reminded of a cooking show in which one of the judges told the contestant that he was adept at harnessing a diversity of exotic flavors, but he neglected the two most basic: salt and pepper.

I wanted really badly to like this book, but it really lacked that page-turning quality that prevents you from putting it down. Usually that comes from a plot that has the reader yearning to know what happens next. The problem is that for most of the book, I generally know what is going to happen next: Glanton and his ragged army of miscreants are going to trudge/amble/meander/make their way across a vast expanse of desert or maybe a promontory/butte/ridge/caldera on their way to the next brutal, senseless act of violence described in explicitly gory detail that reads like Jeffrey Dahmer's dream journal.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mind the violence. But the conventions of narrative structure generally dictate that every scene has a purpose, an underlying rationale, and doesn't exist just for its own sake. I get it that maybe the senselessness of the violence is the point given that one of the themes of the book is that war is a force, an entity whose existence, defying all the premises of a materialistic ontology, predated man's arrival on the earth, or some shit.

While all of that makes perfect sense in terms of expressing a core theme of the book, it's not really great storytelling. I have nothing but apathy about the characters and their lives because they had no real motivation for what they were doing or no conscience about it.

There was no real conflict (for most of the book, anyway) between the named characters, and except for the judge, they didn't have any discernible personality characteristics. Mostly the conflicts would be deadly scuffles involving the really forgettable minor characters that are given names underscoring how disposable they are, like the Delawares and "the black" and even two characters with the same name.

And I totally get it that the point is to hammer home the fact that they are members of a faceless rabble who die violently all the time. These characters are basically McCarthy's red shirts. But the thing is they aren't that much different from the main characters in terms of depth.

You can't really summarize their characteristics without physical descriptions:

ex.
-Toadvine has no ears and he's kind of like a the anti-Huckleberry Finn to the kid's anti-Tom Sawyer in this anti-Western, anti-novel. anti.

- the judge is big and hairless and evil and a pederast and knows a lot about rocks and playing the fiddle.

-Brown does have ears and he also has other people's ears

-Tobin is an ex-priest (so I picture him still wearing his priest collar for some reason, just because.) Note: He also was never technically fully a priest because he dropped out of priest school, so he just said fuck it, I'm going to embrace a nihilistic existence in a dusty, Western hellscape.

At times it felt like most of the novel's plot was a vehicle for McCarthy's wrought descriptions of landscape and his fetish for archaic terminology. And the characters were mostly two-dimensional figurines conjured up to populate McCarthy's bleak bone-littered southwestern tableau and splatter blood across it like it was a canvas at Jackson Pollack's house. On the other hand, my Kindle's dictionary got a workout looking up a lot of obscure words I'll never have cause to use in actual life, but it was fun to look them up anyways.

The reason I qualify a lot of these statements with the phrase "for most of the book" is that it only seems to take on the form of a recognizable plot after Glanton's death, when the antagonism plays out between the kid/man and the judge. It would be one thing if the kid were well developed throughout the novel and this conflict culminated in its final chapters. But throughout most of the story, the kid, despite being nominally the protagonist, is basically a non-entity. It seems like several chapters would pass in which he was scarcely mentioned or not at all.

If the basis for the conflict between the judge and the kid was that the kid harbored in his heart some "sympathy for the heathen," as the judge said, then why wasn't that explored more in the main body of the text? Some critics have argued that the kid is virtuous relative to his companions because he does not gleefully participate in the violence and only does so "reluctantly." But his reluctance never seemed apparent at any time. Maybe he is good under the criteria that good is the absence of evil, but at no point does he really make a stand out of conscience, much less one that puts him into conflict with the judge.

Mostly his character is that of a generic, Western tough guy, and maybe the strong, silent type doesn't lend itself to characterization, but that seems like a cop-out. I would have enjoyed the story more if McCarthy had devoted half as much time as he spent describing violence and landscape on character development. Like most readers, I did find the judge to be pretty fascinating and his expositions alone are well worth the price of admission, but even he doesn't even seem to have a motivation behind his actions other than just being evil because he's some sort of Gnostic demon or whatever.

I think the best part of the book was the ending because of its ambiguity. The absence of specific information about the kid/man's fate sparks the reader's imagination because it stands in contrast with the explicit depiction of all the other scenes of violence in the book (and there are many) rendered in gut-wrenching detail, so I think it does indicate some level of genius and innovation on the part of McCarthy. I would compare it to the ending of the Sopranos.

Some stray observations:
- I have nothing but admiration for the scholarly work that must have gone into researching this book. The obscure terminology, though it sometimes slows the act of reading down, definitely lends authenticity to the book. I also like the fact that McCarthy doesn't translate the Spanish. It's a nice touch.
- That said, I think despite his masterful use of the English language, McCarthy is over the top for my tastes. Coming from a news writing background, I tend to prefer unadorned language as well as standard punctuation. For the love of Christ, I wish he would use quotation marks. Also, I think his excessive verbiage is a little pretentious. There's one passage that stands out in which he likens something to a "medicine show, an itinerant carnival or a traveling circus." All three of those phrases express the same goddamn concept. I think he could not decide which flowery analogy to use so he decided to use all of them.
- I think the one member of the Glanton gang Brown, who has the scapular(see I learned a new word) of ears, is an allusion to the Vietnam War, which would seem to make the whole thing an allegory for the Vietnam War.
- Midway into this book, it dawned on me that Owen Wilson's character in the Royal Tenenbaums is a parody of McCarthy, and I confirmed this searching on the Web. "friscalating dusk-light" sounds about right.


tl; dr

The book's worth the read but it's not for the faint of heart or the short of attention span.