Child of God - Cormac McCarthy

More Travels With Cormac

I’ve just started reading The Crossing, second in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. Those following this blog will know I started reading his work with No Country for Old Men, and then All The Pretty Horses. I have written about the wonderful, lengthy compound sentence structures he uses in that latter novel mentioned, and he continues with these in The Crossing.

I am writing now briefly about Child of God, his novella that I have just finished. In looking for a copy of a cover to post with this, I read that the book was written in 1974 [I hadn’t looked when I read!]. Shows how stupid I am: I perceived of him as a modern writer, in a recent time sense, not the literary one of which he clearly is ‘modern’. It must have been prompted by a sense of the recent movie of NCFOM, and The Road, which I haven’t yet read. And ATPH was written in 1992. It hadn’t struck me that he had started writing and was published in the sixties. And I have only really taken note of him this year. Astonishing.

Child of God is a brilliantly and at times beautifully written story of the disgusting and despicable Lester Ballard, a man-thing who roams and ruts and routs around the hill country of East Tennessee. I’m not sure that there is a classic tension in what we as readers feel about this nasty protagonist, who is never even an anti-hero, and who never seeks our forgiveness or understanding either consciously or otherwise. I don’t believe McCarthy does. Ballard’s isolation both socially and physically in the story isn’t compromised by any authorial hand-holding. You must read this to experience the degradation for yourselves. The only one of two palliatives I can offer is that there are moments of humour. But they don’t last long.

The other is the writing style. At times, this sickening story is expressed so poetically that this could provide the only chance of being serenaded to some kind of empathy, but it is never about a Macbeth who is given salvation and redemption though a heightened language. There are many styles too, from vivid description to first person vernacular by unidentified speakers. Near the end, the sheriff and his deputy think and express themselves as templates for the Sheriff in No Country for Old Men. Here, fairly randomly, are two poetic narrations: the first about fireworks –

High above their upturned faces it burst, sprays of glycerine flaring across the night, trailing down the sky in loosely falling ribbons of hot spectra soon burnt to naught. Another went up, a long whishing sound, fishtailing aloft. In the bloom of its opening you could see like its shadow the image of the rocket gone before, the puff of black smoke and ashen trails arcing out and down like huge and dark medusa squatting in the sky

 and the second, hounds attacking a boar –

Ballard watched this ballet tilt and swirl and churn mud up through the snow and watched the lovely blood there in its holograph of battle, spray burst from a ruptured lung, the dark heart’s blood, pinwheel and pirouette, until shots rang and all was done

There are countless more, some where the poetry is more lyrically in tune with the qualities being described, others even more antithetical in the grotesque juxtapositions of beautiful language and horrific events/situations. In this respect, there is schizophrenia in the reading, and I highly recommend the madness.

Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty Horses

Writing

As an American who has spent most of his life in England I have dual nationality by way of experience if not by legal right, not that the latter would make any real difference. As a writer I have and use both voices – often together; often separately - and as a reader I make a varying preferential choice for either of these two voices.

I feel that my best writing comes from my American voice and it is when it is conversational and attains a natural rhythm and sound. My English voice – though this is going to be quite simplistic – is when I impose structures/form on that writing, for example in my sonnets when I use rhyme in quite an obvious way. As I’ve said above, there are times when these are kept quite separate. It’s more complex than this, and I have explained more comprehensively elsewhere – though not in this blog – but this shorthand will do for now.

For those few following this blog you will know that I have been reading the American voice of late: quite a bit of Steinbeck, always Ray Carver, Patrick deWitt [I know he’s Canadian, but...] and most recently Cormac McCarthy. In trying out my next new read I thought I’d have a go at McEwan’s Atonement. I couldn’t get into it: far too English. Brilliantly so, a luxuriant prose in many respects, and so tuned into representation of character, thoughts and feelings, and sense of place, especially inside and interiors and what these too represent. I made about five pages.

Then I found I actually had McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses and hadn’t read yet [as I’ve said, I’m catching up]. Hooked immediately. I love the simple flow – deceptively so, of course – of the narrative and dialogue. And as I continue to make simplistic claims, another appeal at the moment is his ability to write about the exterior. By this I mean the expanse of land and open spaces McCarthy can write about because of where his stories are set. But it is more than this and below is a particular example of that American voice I want to celebrate. I’m trying to not make this sound like a lesson, but that’s difficult, so you can either listen or chat amongst yourselves. Here’s the passage, the fifth paragraph into the opening chapter:

As he turned to go he heard the train. He stopped and waited for it. He could feel it under his feet. It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes creating out of the night the endless faceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone. Then he turned and went back to the house.

It’s that long, wonderful sentence. And it’s because it follows the first three short ones – the most brilliant set-up. I think Raymond Chandler is one of America’s finest modern writers, and apart from his unique talent with similes, he is master of the long compound sentence. He is also master of mixing up his sentence lengths. But McCarthy’s takes this further. It is in the richness of the grammatical make-up of that long gaze, represented by the sentence, and how we as readers try to take in all the detail too, detail heightened by the weightiness of verbs, surprise naming [nouns yes, but it is more than this] and the succession of ‘and’ connectives that should jar but don’t because where they lead is too demanding of our attention.

Hey, I said you could chat – I didn’t say you could do that! If you’re not interested, I apologise, but do me the courtesy. Your homework is to turn to the third page and read the even longer paragraph beginning In the evening he settled his horse and rode.... The example of the meandering compound sentence is even more elaborate here. And it isn’t a style that McCarthy labours to produce. It happens here at the beginning and then tends to disappear. But you keep hoping to hear more. 

Cormac McCarthy – No Country for Old Men

Never For A Lazy Sunday

After reading DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, I began his first novel Ablutions, having ordered on the strength of his superlative sophomore book. Its dark bartender narrative, however, didn’t engage me and I soon gave up. That much observed ennui and despair without any sense of a comic or even sardonic overview just didn’t have the capacity to maintain my interest. It could be that the brilliance of The Sisters Brothers cast too daunting an expectation.

So I turned to my recent charity shop purchace of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, my first McCarthy read [I am behind the times, this book itself published in 2005, though like many I’d seen the Coen brothers’ film]. If Ablutions appears saloon dark and dirty, No Country... is the blackest and bleakest of universal presentations, though pointedly set in 1980s America, Texas to be precise, so it is best to see it as socio-historically and culturally a Western universalising, even a modernised Wild West metaphor.

What it does possess is a dark humour to counter-balance its nihilism. Sheriff Bell has a homespun philosophical wit that allows him to observe wryly on the things that abhor, frighten and disappoint him about the world as it is. Even the evil Chigurh has his comic assessments, either through internal narrative or dialogue when thinking about or relaying directly to the person he is about to kill.

The themes of honour and duty are prevalent ones, and McCarthy presents them with an amazing insight into their complexities. Sheriff Bell has an ‘old-fashioned’ commitment to serve and protect the citizens who fall within his jurisdiction, though he would extend this to anyone in genuine need because that is the way he was brought up. These ‘old-fashioned’ values are for Bell the ones upon which his country/county [an important symbolism as well as linguistic similarity] have been built and which are now under absolute threat by the modern world, or the world of the 80s when the story is set. The ostensible threat comes from narcotics in every aspect of its grip on the country/county/[world]: the effects of the drug itself, the criminals who buy and sell it, the ‘dopes’ who take it, the horrific consequences of this, and ultimately the greed and dispassion which underpins and grows from it. The main consequence of this in the novel is a multitude of killings. McCarthy's detailed description of these and the guns that facilitate it provides an astonishingly informed and clinical narrative.

The relentless, remorseless Chigurh has his own code of honour which is to carry out his commitment to a job whatever the cost. The cost is usually killing someone or many people and he is unstoppable in this commitment. The only iota of escape offered to occasional imminent victims – if they even have a moment of such opportunity – is the flip of a coin, which in the two cases it is offered doesn’t even work in their favour. Chigurh’s world and control over it is that certain – even chance has no chance of changing the inevitable.

Other key characters are Moss, somewhere in the middle of good-guy Bell and bad-guy Chigurh, a Vietnam vet and welder who stumbles on that very nightmare consequence of this drug-corrupted modern world and in being tempted to benefit from this, essentially launches the story with its multiple escapes and chases, his own existential greed tempered by not having been directly involved in the existence of the money he decides to take as well as wanting mainly to improve his and his wife’s quality of life; his wife Carla Jean whose Christian beliefs are frankly not up to competing with what is going on at this time, and Bell’s wife Loretta who loves her husband unconditionally and provides him with stoical support as well as a colossal wisdom: the closing scenes of these two reflecting on and talking about what their life and the world in general has become provides the book’s most perceptive philosophy

There is so much more that I have left out – like Bell’s wartime secret – but that’s for you to read, but also the fact that for all of its simple narrative, driven by hypnotically realistic and/or surreal dialogue, it is packed with depths and complex tangents. I don’t know if the following Times recommendation on the back cover blurb is taken out of context, but it is so woefully bereft of touching on this book’s impact and significance that it is genuinely hilarious:

A Western thriller with a racy plot and punchy dialogue. Perfect for a lazy Sunday.