The two books also present a similarly dichotomous moral universe, with paternalistic caretaking on one side and ruthless amorality on the other. But in The Road that paternalism has a luminosity that it does not have in No Country for Old Men. The books don’t sound exactly the same - The Road, to my ear at least, is much more poetic, not just in its cadences but in its tendency towards symbolism - but I think it would be easy to guess, if somehow you didn’t already know, that they come from the same literary mind. There’s the same accumulation of terse, practical sentences propelling the story forward there’s the same obscure yet precise vocabulary there’s the same scrupulous, almost tedious, recounting of physical and technical actions there’s the same eccentric punctuation there’s the same unflinchingly graphic but never quite voyeuristic violence. No Country for Old Men is stylistically enough like The Road that I feel retrospectively justified in having taken the later novel as provisionally representative.
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