And I do hope the next companion does not pine after the Doctor because, enough!
It's gotten really old really fast.
Very disturbing novel, but one of my favorite reads so far this year. The prose is spare but it reads like poetry. And I did appreciate that glimmer of hope at the end.
I think that, like cofax7 said, it wouldn't have been emotionally bearable without it. It's a book that is going to stay with me for a very long time. (You might want to check out Blood Meridian if this sort of thing interests you; it's a very particular picture of the American West and the inexorable forces of violence and greed that underly a lot of our comfortable mythology about settlement.)
The idea of the road as a dangerous gathering place for the remnants as well as a navigational tool is interesting, because it's such the focal point of the story. I wonder how much the man's expectations about how people behave played into the way they traveled, because he didn't seem like someone who was filled with boundless optimism about humanity even before the apocalypse; all of his optimism lived in the boy alone. But at the same time, I'm not sure the logistics, at least how I read them, support the idea of people being able to observe the man and the boy from a distance as they traveled, which is part of the reason I found the end kind of odd; I picked up that the new man implied they'd been watching the man and the boy, but didn't see how that would have worked at all.
The idea of people hiding out and watching the road for danger coming didn't seem that far out there for me, given the circumstances of the book.
I guess, but I rather got the impression that the other man and his family were also traveling south? The man and the boy's journey was sporadic enough, and filled with enough detours off the road, that I have a hard time picturing them being easily watched from a distance. And the man was so careful about things like that that I kind of hate to think that someone was watching them without him being aware of it; that level of protection was the only thing he had to give the boy, and it was something he was really good at. Then again, at the end, the man was very ill and they were more or less staying in the same spot for a few days. (And while I thought the lack of names was really effective in the novel, it makes it really hard to talk about the part where there were two men!)
Yes, I didn't get the impression that they had been following them, but more that they had seen them coming and then the boy and the man stopped because the man was so ill. I rather liked the idea of more "good guys" being out there, I guess. :-)
And yes, the absence of names, along with the punctuation (or lack thereof) was very effective. But yeah, we had that problem in book club - "the man - no, the other man." Hee.
It's gotten really old really fast.
Very disturbing novel, but one of my favorite reads so far this year. The prose is spare but it reads like poetry. And I did appreciate that glimmer of hope at the end.
I think that, like cofax7 said, it wouldn't have been emotionally bearable without it. It's a book that is going to stay with me for a very long time. (You might want to check out Blood Meridian if this sort of thing interests you; it's a very particular picture of the American West and the inexorable forces of violence and greed that underly a lot of our comfortable mythology about settlement.)
The idea of the road as a dangerous gathering place for the remnants as well as a navigational tool is interesting, because it's such the focal point of the story. I wonder how much the man's expectations about how people behave played into the way they traveled, because he didn't seem like someone who was filled with boundless optimism about humanity even before the apocalypse; all of his optimism lived in the boy alone. But at the same time, I'm not sure the logistics, at least how I read them, support the idea of people being able to observe the man and the boy from a distance as they traveled, which is part of the reason I found the end kind of odd; I picked up that the new man implied they'd been watching the man and the boy, but didn't see how that would have worked at all.
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The idea of people hiding out and watching the road for danger coming didn't seem that far out there for me, given the circumstances of the book.
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I guess, but I rather got the impression that the other man and his family were also traveling south? The man and the boy's journey was sporadic enough, and filled with enough detours off the road, that I have a hard time picturing them being easily watched from a distance. And the man was so careful about things like that that I kind of hate to think that someone was watching them without him being aware of it; that level of protection was the only thing he had to give the boy, and it was something he was really good at. Then again, at the end, the man was very ill and they were more or less staying in the same spot for a few days. (And while I thought the lack of names was really effective in the novel, it makes it really hard to talk about the part where there were two men!)
Reply
And yes, the absence of names, along with the punctuation (or lack thereof) was very effective. But yeah, we had that problem in book club - "the man - no, the other man." Hee.
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