Ash, ash, ash, and the boy.

I read this in November, when the light goes at four o'clock, which was a mistake and also exactly right.

There is no punctuation to speak of. No quotation marks. No chapter numbers. Just grey slabs of text with white space falling between them like ash falling between the pages, and I want to say that this ought to have annoyed me, and instead it did the opposite; it puts you inside the man's head, where there is no room left for the ordinary furniture of a sentence.

The world has ended and we never find out why, and thank God for that, because a paragraph explaining what happened would have ruined the whole thing. What matters is the road, the cart, the tarpaulin, the pistol with two rounds in it — and what the second one is for. And the boy.

The boy is the only reason the book is bearable. He is the one who keeps asking whether they are still the good guys. He wants to feed the old man on the road. He wants to help the man who stole from them. He cries about the dog. His father has become a hard, watchful, frightened animal, because that is what love turns into when the world ends, and the boy is somehow still a person. Are we carrying the fire? Yes. We are carrying the fire.

I have a son. He is fourteen, he is currently very hard to talk to, he plays a lot of football and he thinks I am an idiot. I do not believe you can read this as a father and not put it down two or three times to go and stand at the bottom of the stairs and listen to your child moving about upstairs. I did that twice.

The house with the cellar in it is the most frightening thing I have ever read and I am not going to describe it here. I skipped half a page. I'd never done that before in my life.

McCarthy's prose is a strange instrument. Nine tenths of it is stripped back to the bone and then out of nowhere comes some enormous cathedral of a sentence full of words I had to look up, and somehow that is not showing off, it is a man remembering what language used to be able to do before it all got burnt.

The ending divides people. I will only say that the last paragraph, the one with the brook trout and the maps and the world in its becoming, is one of the most beautiful things written in my lifetime, and I do not fully understand it, and I have copied it out longhand into the back of my diary.

Nine. Not for everybody. Do not read it in November.