Comment on style/language

The language of the novel is at times casual and at others extremely formal. There is a character in the novel, the Judge, who is highly intelligent and clearly educated. The Judge often uses language that is complicated and difficult to understand. Also, many of the characters tend to speak in sentence structures that are unusual, inverting words in a way that is not common in today's language. Since the characters spend a large amount of time in Mexico, there is also a lot of Spanish in this novel that is not clearly translated within the text, leaving the reader to puzzle out the translations by the actions surrounding the statements.