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Reading Cormac McCarthy began as one of the best ways there is to experience new fiction: a recommendation. I’d never even heard of him. The author, who has both experienced poverty and won prestigious prizes in his career, is continuing to write into what will be his eighth decade. Three of his books have been turned into films; two of them, The Road and No Country for Old Men, which written in the last decade. But he had somehow slipped under my reading radar. Until now.
The days are growing colder. The trees are falling. And the things that you put into your head now will be there forever.
In The Road, a man and a boy head south, scavenging their way across an ashy America. It grows, hugely, before them. A few survivors limp the same path, carving through the vast emptiness. Corpses lie in their beds. But hooded men also walk the road, lengths of pipe in their fists.
This is a novel about survival and sacrifice; about existing, for the sake of existing. Life has become primitive. McCarthy grapples with the relationships between humans, and with what being human now means. Its protagonists, a man and a boy, reach helplessly towards an end; any end. Humanity is tested to its limits. And their time is running out.
McCarthy slowly creates a creeping sense of anticipation; a terrifying sensation of the menace inching its way towards them. Perhaps most effectively, the narrative only gestures towards how this came to be. Faded advertisement boards line their route, ghostily signposting the old land of opportunity. It is for the reader to resurrect the fire from the ashes, and decipher the suggestions that silently point their finger to what has taken place. For me, the book’s ending almost doesn’t do justice to the rest of it. And reading outside, in the bright, end-of-September sunshine only exaggerated the book’s horror.
There’s some bad people after me. I took something that belongs to em and they want it back.
McCarthy defies the usual logic of the hunter pursuing the hunted in No Country for Old Men. A man stumbles upon a messy scene of drugs, dead Mexicans, and a briefcase containing 2.4 million dollars. But the usual cat-and-mouse equation re-writes itself. Other, uncontainable patterns of retribution break this rule, constantly turning the equation on its head. The novel demands how a man decides in what order to abandon his life; a question that its characters will have to answer.
The decision to take the money and to leave his life puts Llewellyn Moss in extreme danger. Like The Road, the novel wrestles with the problem of identifying who the bad guys really are. He becomes caught up in a sequence of crime, drugs, bloodshed, and contract killers. The hunters and the hunted tread in others footsteps, catching up to one other. Following them is a sheriff; a man carrying his own regrets. Arguably the novel’s most interesting character, this is like nothing he has ever encountered before.
Llewellyn is pursued by the cold-eyed, dispassionate Chigurh. His, like the sheriff’s, is another kind of justice; a fateful brand of it with inevitable consequence. Convinced of his strange killing logic, Chigurh intones ‘when I came into your life, your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end.’ What is disturbing about him is his relentlessness; his loyalty to tying up loose ends. For Cormac McCarthy, authentic literature should deal with issues of life and death - the things that drive Chigurh. Invisible strings of fate stretch across America. And, as things catch up with themselves, everyone in the novel seems to be heading straight to him.
The Road and No Country for Old Men are both dark and cinematic. McCarthy’s words are economical and sparing; the lines of his language clean-cut, and his dialogue stripped of punctuation. His characters walk the line between life and death, fighting to survive in the space in-between. The author’s other book to have been committed to celluloid is the 1992 All the Pretty Horses. Why not give it a read?
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