No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy at his terse best

No Country for Old Men (2005) by Cormac McCarthy stars off in medias res.

When Llwewllyn Moss is out hunting antelope near the Rio Grande he stumbles into the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. There is one man still barely alive who asks Moss for water. Moss does not have any. He searches the vehicles at the scene and finds heroin in one of them and a whole armoury’s worth of weapons. Off on a hill a little way away there is one more man, dead now, sitting there with a case full of money. Moss takes the money and goes back to his wife Carla Jean. During the night he suddenly gets an attack of conscience and thinks of the dying man’s request for water. He goes back to the site of the drug deal. That’s where things start going pear-shaped.

There are three main players in this novel. Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, also a veteran, but from a different war (World War II) and Anton Chigurh, a hitman.

Each of these men represent a different philosophical standpoint and a different set of values. Moss is a practical tactician, a man who has served in Vietnam as a sniper and he is opportunistic enough to take the drug money when he finds it, knowing all the while that it might end up being a very bad decision. Ed Tom, the Sheriff, has the perspective of a man that lived through the second world war and did reprehensible things during combat that still haunt him. He has seen the direction of the development of society and he finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile what he remembers from his youth with the reality he finds himself living in. His saving grace seems to be the undying love between him and his wife, that is where he finds his redemption and balm. Chigurh is a consummate sociopath, which means he has a deeply philosophical streak that does not stop him in the least from deciding a man’s fate (or a woman’s, for that matter) with a coin toss. There is no sense that he has a conscience in a conventional sense, but he has a code of conduct in a manner of speaking. Once he has accepted an assignment, there is nothing he won’t do to finish the job.

There are also levels of language in this triptych that reflect and enhance what goes on in the chain of events. The passages concerning Moss and Chigurh are mostly coolly descriptive and given in the third person. Dialogue is spare and very focused. McCarthy has an ear for the dialect of the Texas-region and shows a blatant disregard for punctuation and typical dialogue format that gives a heightened feeling of immediacy. The way the action is described makes this bare bones approach unrelenting and somehow makes the bloody violence of it worse.

I’ll give an example. This is the description of Moss trying to outrun pursuers in the desert.

“It was a long trek and he was still some two hundred yards from the river when he heard the truck. A raw gray light was breaking over the hills. When he looked back he could see the dust against the new skyline. Still the better part of a mile away. In the dawn quiet the sound of it no more sinister than a boat on a lake. Then he heard it downshift. He pulled the .45 from his belt so that he wouldn’t lose it and set out at a dead run. When he looked back again it had closed a good part of the distance.” (McCarthy, p. 31).

Chigurh brings all those horror movie Terminator machine killers to mind in his focus. He just keeps coming, no matter how his victims plead or fight back.

Sheriff Bell is given a reflective, almost poetic first person voice that talks calmly to the reader about his experiences and impressions.
This is what Bell’s voice sounds like;

“My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how an tell the truth. He said there was nothing to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not having to decide who you were. And if you done something wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Dont haul stuff around with you. I guess that all sounds pretty simple today. Even to me. All the more reason to think about it. He didn’t say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say.” (McCarthy, p. 249).

These literary techniques are dovetailed into each other seamlessly and with spare grace.

I reflected on quality of relentlessness in McCarthy’s novels The Road and Blood Meridian as well, the way lean, descriptive prose creates a forward momentum within the text itself as well as for me as a reader. It is probably a matter of me being unusually susceptible to this particular style, but for some reason the very sparseness makes the violence more gruesome for me personally, letting me use my imagination to fill in all that has not been said. I can look at what McCarthy does and take a step back and wonder how it is even possible that the effect can be as devastating as it is. It is a clear case of less being more.

The title for this novel is borrowed from William Butler Yeats poem ”Sailing to Byzanthium”, and there is some kind of weird gegenshein effect between the poem in lines like old men being like “a tattered coat upon a stick” in relation to the description of the old man Sheriff Bell visits and tells of his exploits in WWII.

Lean and terse though the prose might be, that does not mean it is in any way simple, or simplistic. There is no real nostalgia, no moral high ground, no easy solutions. I like the fact that something this terse can pack such a considerable punch and it really does something spectacular for those of us who can stand it.

Mule

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy – Violence to the cold extreme

Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian first published in 1985 is probably one of the most violent books I’ve ever read – and that’s saying something. Violence is sort of the theme here, and not in any way that makes you feel easy about the subject. This is not a moral parable that will give you easy outs by defining the areas of right and wrong through the use of dialectic morality. This is more the kind of tale that lays bare the most sordid aspects of human nature without giving you any handles and you’ll just have to make up your own mind about it.

See, now, the warlike nature of man – that is what we’re dealing with here and no matter how much we as a species propound that we want peace, we just never seem to get there, do we? That’s what this is all about.

It’s set along the borderland between the US and Mexico in 1849-1850 and we’re riding with the Glanton gang who are taking scalps and massacring Indians. This is not Manifest Destiny in any pretty Laura Ingalls kind of way. This is dirty and bloody and unnecessarily cruel in every single manner you can imagine. What makes it worse is the cool and detached way the author goes about his business.

The main protagonist is The Kid, a young man who leaves his home in Tennessee and gets signed up by Captain White to ride with the gang. He takes the bloodiness of the business in stride as far as we as readers can tell, and only ever runs contrary to expectations when his own physical safety is in question.

Set against all this is the Judge, a huge towering giant of a man with intellectual capital and a strain of mysticism and otherworldliness about him, not only in appearance, but in reasoning as well.

Here’s the logic of the thing, given the form of dialogue between The Judge and a man called Brown.

“What is my trade?
War. War is your trade. Is it not?
And it ain’t yours?
Mine too. Very much so.
What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?
All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That’s your notion.
The judge smiled.” (Blood Meridian, p. 249)

This novel has something in common with Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Actually, it probably has a lot in common with it. The Judge is like Kurtz, The Kid like Marlowe. And there is much, much more to it than that.

The language of it is beautiful and uses so many archaisms and rare words that you find yourself reading slowly to catch it all.

It also has the cool inexorable quality that I recognize from McCarthy’s The Road. It never lets up, not even for a second. Nothing comes to any good and even the end leaves you with a sickening reeling feeling in your stomach, being open enough that you can use your own imagination on the horror of it.

It gives violence in relentless and impartial detail and shows us everything we don’t want to see. It never judges, or offers a moral high ground. It also describes the landscape in a way unlike anything I’ve seen before. It’s just fascinating and deeply unsettling, every aspect of it – and like all the best books it makes you work hard for any understanding.

Mule

Billy the Kid

Staying on the trail of Michael Ondaatje I would like to get in to The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970). If you have come into contact with Ondaatje’s work through his novels you will probably be a bit surprised by his poetry and books like this one, which is a sort of prose poem combining differnt styles and modes of expression.

The main character is the outlaw gunman Billy the Kid (1859-1881) also known as William H. Bonney or Henry McCarty. Undoubtedly you’ve seen some cowboy western featuring Billy, there have been a few made of varying quality (I wont pass judgement on Young Guns or even Billy the Kid v.s. Dracula). He is one of those iconic figures that loom out of the myths of Manifest Destiny along with Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Black Elk and so on and so forth.

Ondaatje takes hold of his subject with a mixture of scholarly intensity and poetic verve. Some passages read like newspaper articles, others are short lists (people that have been killed, for example) again others are copies of the Penny Dreadfuls of the time featuring wild west characters. There’s a rough kind of humor in some passages, lyrical descriptions of a love interest, sex, death, horses… And the wide landscape Billy travels through. The descriptions are intense and slightly dreamy. They are the kind of distant musings you’d expect from someone who spends the entire day on horseback staring at the horizon.

Ondaatje also changes perspecitves in the sense that the narrative voice shifts, quoting Miss Sallie Chisum for instance. I like the diversity of the many voices and different types of text. It creates a collage of thoughts and impressions surrounding the iconic figure of Billy giving the reader a different image of what he was like as well as what the times were like. History is often recited as a given truth and this accentuates that you can never really know what actions and events are really like when you depend on eye witness accounts and the impressions of others. You get a kind of historical event refractured through many minds and voices – and this realates to the novle I wrote about previously Coming Through Slaughter.

I would say that this idea of history, disjointed accounts and fractured voices is a central theme in all of Ondaatjes work. Just like the lyrical passages and the obvious romance with language which is ever present in his body of work. He not only takes care to find the right word, he also creates a voice for each character which is distinct and clear. This care of language and voice is one of the reasons I keep coming back to his material, pouring over it and tracing the lines with my curious mental fingers. Touching the words tentatively, moulding their shapes, turning them over and over.

This is one of my favourite passages in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

You know hunters

are the gentlest

anywhere in the world

they halt caterpillars

from path dangers

lift a drowning moth from a bowl

remarkable in peace

in the same way assassins

come to chaos neutral.

It’s terse, lyrical and nicely exemplifies the duality of the characters. Violence and poetry in a balanced blend – my favourite.

MULE