Oh, I’m sure I’ll have more to say as the story settles into my mind to raise questions of the sort we don’t like to think about.
There’s always a sadness to finishing a good book. I wanted it to go on some more. If it were a movie, then a sequel would be planned for the boy at age twenty. He would’ve learned some way to make the machinery work. Some way to plant seeds deep into the earth. Some way to rebuild life.
McCarthy leaves a lot of what other writers and readers would consider vital information out of his stories. Was the boy in fact born after the devastating event? The woman was pregnant at the time. What was the slow decline of mankind in the immediate aftermath? Starvation, moving on to seek someplace where it wasn’t all dust, helping each other until that could no longer be done, the bad guys looting right from day one, and most of the good guys going bad. But none of that is really important after all.
It could happen. It could happen just as McCarthy lays it out. So it’s something to consider–and maybe not much we can do much about.
But it can’t be forgotten.
Okay.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology