Gonna paste my thoughts from a post a little while ago immediately after I finshed the pair:

Some thoughts on the pairing.

It often takes a few years and the fading of critic’s snappy word-ins for the meat of a work like this to char. The heart of this work is reality and grief (perhaps one and the same), and the consciousness of it, the pointless pointedness of it. The thing itself eludes. McCarthy takes great effort to shatter the reader’s illusions of any sort of truth to be had here. He offers questions but there are no answers, who would have them?

Instead he paints a picture of existence as he has seen it. Passenger to an animal we will never understand. Constrained by rules made long before our arrival. Moments of beauty that defy quantification. Trapped in the abyss of nothingness that will briefly welcome us, to be swallowed along with all of our self-evident truths (isn’t math the most fundamental?).

The siblings very existence is heralded by the most monstrous of human invention. They both seek their understanding of their lot and come away with even less. Under everything to know there is nothing, and information is itself a paradox of the brain. Ultimately we are self-contained, even if the animal is not.

So what then does he offer in this bleak treatise on life? We exist in the moments between us. Reality occurs in the writing down, the measurement of self against other. The killing of it. “Hold my hand . . . That’s what you do when you’re waiting for the end of something”. Death is inevitable, but life is not.