Awesome in the original meaning of the word. Also a hot mess. I don't think I would recommend this as a first McCarthy book, but it's a tour de force - a rehashing of many elements from his previous books multiplied by a new, cosmic constant of darkness.
The darkness, or truth, is always there in his previous works - allowing for the chinks of light he lets slip through. Here via quantum physics, pure mathematics and the atomic bomb it receives a Universal upgrade.
"We are flawed at our core that is what we know. We loath ourselves insufficient to our deserts. So how bad is the world ? How bad? The world's truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that one day all of this will be ground to powder and blow into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise... When it's all gone, for whom will this be a tragedy?" What a question.
The book starts of as a mystery, a thriller. Yet this gradually falls away if the face of a tragic love story speckled with some of his interests.
McCarthy is 89, and this book has been in the works for decades. It feels like he's putting it all down one last time. All his learning about science from the Santa Fe institute, the conspiracies he's heard, the research he has done, his (insightful and brilliant) thoughts about the subconscious.
But not all of the elements of the book fit. For example (the author) seems to have thoughts on the Vietnam war and the JFK assassination so they are shoehorned into bar conversations. They are super interesting, but have little if anything to do with the plot - I mean, you could say the same for so much of the book! But the maths & physics stuff has a much clearer literary position within the story, embodied by the doomed brother & sister.
That said, if you don't like hanging threads don't read this book, I will immediately read Stella Maris, the companion 'coda' book with much more of the sister, but I do not expect the multiple complicated equations that stand in for plot to be solved there! Maybe one big one would be nice, there's scope for that at least!
McCarthy is not know for writing funny books, yet here I genuinely laughed out loud several times, especially with Alicia, the paranoid schizophrenic sister and her 'cohorts', but also with some of Bobby's friends.
There are a few chinks of light, reasons or instances of goodness, once Bobby calling out God because of beauty, and his Nana insisting that you need to believe in some form of goodness as you can't live a good life without doing so. This a little like taking joy, meaning, and even 'god' in the small things, like Camus and his coffee. Maybe it is not universal, cosmic, provable by mathematics - but it can provide solace, meaning, and joy.
There are practical snippets and insights into human nature - "Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice."
"Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget"
"don't know. I think there are times when you’d just like to get it over with. I think a lot of people would elect to be dead if they didn't have to die."
And there are deeper sections. McCarthy has history of going off-piste in the final chapter- in a good way. See Blood Meridian and the Border trilogy. Here he really outdoes himself. There are epic sections of literature/philosophy (see above and below) and the prose becomes full blown cosmic poetry. In some of his earlier works you only get this in parts, he makes you work for it, but it is present throughout here, just turned up to 11 towards the end.
"Trudging the shingles of the universe, his thin shoulders turned to the stellar winds and the suck of alien moons dark as stones. A lonely shoreloper hurrying against the night, small and friendless and brave."
"God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest."
"In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black Suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against"
"God was not interested in our theology, only our silence"
"His father. Who had created out of the absolute dust of the earth an evil sun by whose light men saw like some hideous adumbration of their own ends through cloth and flesh the bones in one another’s bodies."
"Dead friend. the ground we walk is less of our choosing than we imagine" - indeed, and McCarthy has such a knack of bringing that into focus, the grand proclamations and promises of doom, contrasted with he beauty of the landscapes, the vivid pain, feeling and hope of his creatures, all of us.