All the Pretty Horses

'McCarthy-lite,' Scott had warned me.

There's a case for the sell-out I'm sure, but in truth I found it to be an odd synthesis of McCarthy styles , where passages of notable verbosity are followed by others in which sparseness predominates, in places deserving of its reputation as modern American classic, yet with an awful lot of riding around going on between them − a feature I recall from the author's other would-be masterpiece, Blood Meridian.

As for the so-called romance at the heart of the story, I guess one man's mythic western is another's telenovela. I know which genre bell is clanging in the wind when McCarthy first describes the hacendero's daughter with her wide-brimmed black hat and matching Arabian horse. ("Real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal.")

Here's one of the occasional outbreaks of McCathy-heavy, including the kind of complex metaphor that defies any sort of accurate imaginative reconstruction:

"In the grey twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed on the waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an Autumn pool."

There are also one or two nameless things dotted around this verbal landscape too, surely McCarthy's most over-used adjective of opportunity. ("Ranchero music with its falsetto cries almost like an agony played out of a cheap radio somewhere in the nameless night.")

Having dipped into works representing both his Tennessee and Western periods, my preference remains for his two most recent novels The Road and No Country for Old Men. I think it is largely to do with the way he handles dialogue in them (less decoratively), and how the richness of his style has also evolved into something altogether less obstructive to the narrative impetus.

I honestly can't remember having salivated with such enthusiasm over the prospect of seeing an upcoming movie than I have over the Coen brother's apparently faithful take on No Country for Old Men.

On the other hand I can't say that I will seek out the DVD of Billy Bob Thornton's adaptation of this novel (with Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz) with anything like the same degree of enthusiasm. Hollywood cast a pair of fairly grown-up actors to play a pair of ill-fitted lovers who in the text were aged 16 and 17 respectively. Yet 'mojado reverso' John Grady Cole never really convinces as a fugitive adolescent in Mexico; the character is often little more than a cipher for an old man's wisdom and a senescent code.

There are certainly a number of very cinematic scenes in this book. The dance at the grange is a favourite of mine, and then there's the Mexican jail. The story also has one of those extended confrontations about two thirds of the way through where one character lectures another at length about how the world really is. This is the Hacienda's old maid aunty, who dresses with a "chilling" elegance and explains to Cole how the 'Spaniards' tend to pursue truth and honour in all their forms but not their substance, and how there are no control groups in history to reveal what might have been.

When Cole realises that Alejandra is determined to respect her aunt's wishes and dump him he reflects that "all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all." Yet like the majority of McCarthy's girls, she never approximates a fully-realised person, and it is therefore very hard to imagine what might have been in their relationship had her decision been different.

The friendship between Cole and Rawlins places McCarthy firmly back in his comfort zone though, and this little gem of cowboy wisdom from Rawlins was a salient moment in their always enjoyable dialogue:

"Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing."

Overcoming the Monster

Is how Christopher Booker refers to the first of the The Seven Basic Plots seemingly common to all stories told in all cultures, across all periods of history.

It's a fascinating chapter. The monster in question can be literally so (Grendel, Jaws) or figuratively so (Bond baddies, The Nazis) and usually has three main characteristics, beyond being self-seeking by nature and utterly heartless.

- Predator: preys on communities, usually one community in particular.

- Holdfast: has a lair, usually underground, in which it likes to keep all its stuff, and quite often a beautiful female or substantial treasure that will require extraction.

- Avenger: when provoked it becomes especially demented.

However, the monster usually has a blind spot or some other crucial vulnerability which the hero is ultimately able to exploit, but not before experiencing a great deal of hazard. Across world literature the hero's struggle against the monster tends to follow a familiar five stage pattern:

1) The call - a period of anticipation, where the full extent of the threat that the monster poses may be underestimated.

2) The dream phase - a period of initial success (such as Bond's triumph over Goldfinger at cards at the Fontainbleu), when things seem to be going according to plan from the hero's perspective.

3) Confrontation - a period of frustration as the hero starts to get closer to the monster in its well-defended den. Whether the hero is James Bond or Perseus, he tends to enter this phase equipped with 'magic' weapons.

4) The nightmare phase - the final ordeal in which the hero will face failure and extinction: a spot so tight that release from it seems most unlikely.

5) The miraculous escape - sometimes, as in War of the Worlds, the hero can only watch as the monster's flaw is exposed with little input from himself. In High Noon however, Gary Cooper's miraculous escape is provided for by his quaker wife returning to take down one of the baddies from a window overlooking the enactment of his nightmare phase.

In general the hero and/or the community being terrorised is seen to begin the tale in a state of constriction. There follows a period of relative liberation (such as the arrival of the Magnificent Seven in the Mexican village), which culiminates in the final ordeal which proposes an altogether more terminal form of the restriction. There is ordinarily a sense that the death of the monster at the end of the story has lead to some sort of deeper liberation in the lives of the hero and the wider community.

Booker makes the point that although World War II is a recent historical event, the way we tell stories about it tends to conform to a pattern as old as literature itself.

Now all this is interesting in terms of how Cormac McCarthy handles his representation of evil (and particularly Judge Holden) in Blood Meridian. In constructing his alternative western mythology, he doesn't so much subvert the form as completely ignore it.

In places it reads like a non-fiction account of the activities of the Glanton Gang, albeit written in highly poeticised prose. Holden, himself an historical figure with known characteristics, has some of the physical abnormalities that human instances of the monster usually need to have in traditional narrative. McCarthy's judge also appears ageless and able to pop up all over the place. However, his heartlessness is perhaps less clear-cut than your average Gestapo agent, and he demonstrates an intellectual curiosity that we normally associate with a more humanist mentality (though this turns out to be an aspect of his control-freakishness).

Some have called McCarthy's presentation of evil gnostic. I'm not so sure about this. He certainly seems to believe that evil is inevitable, as I do myself, but that is not gnosticism per se. This quotation from one of his rare interviews is revealing:

"There is no such thing as life without bloodshed...I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."

So, we might have to add him to the list of intellectual figures that could well have been influenced by Schopenhauer − good is only conceivable within the context of existence within the world of phenomena. Beyond this existence, in the transcendental world of noumena, there is only the heartless Will, which for its very objectivity (and unlike Buddhism's Brahman) is more likely to be the source of evil consequences down here than good ones. Gnosticism on the other hand, posits two equally-weighted deities, one good, one evil, both in the transcendental plane, with the material world itself unquestionably the work of the nastier one.

It's also worth noting that McCarthy's mouthpieces of evil all seem to believe in a crude form of determinism.

Tommy Lee Jones owns the film rights to Blood Meridian, but one wonders how successful a Hollywood take on this could be. So much of its power is locked up in the language. Holden's dual nature as flesh-and-blood man and incarnation of a mythic malignancy would be hard to capture on screen. The way that 'The Kid' disappears from direct view within the gang during the mid-section of the story would also prove problematical I suspect.

Yet one senses that McCarthy's way of handling sudden acts of violence would appeal to certain directors. What makes them most shocking is the way they rarely appear to have any function within the plot. Under Holden's tutelage the scalp-hunters become agents of the most senseless, indiscriminate form of savagery.

In No Country for Old Men I was also struck by the way that the principle of evil, impersonated by Anton Chigurh, exists on its own narrative plane within the story. Few of the individuals that interact with Chigurh survive to tell the tale and crucially, Sheriff Bell and Chigurh never connect before the deluge of violence at the heart of this novel has finally abated.

I bought The Road last night and will report on it in due course.

McCarthyisms #7

When Blood Meridian was published Caryn James wrote in the NYT that "While it is hard to get through it, it is hard to ignore it."

For the first eighty pages or so I was inclined to agree with fellow Harry Potter-hater Harold Bloom's opinion that McCarthy's novel stands as one of the greatest literary achievements of our age, but then I started to get a bit bogged down. Up until then I had been enthusiastically telling people that here at last was an author writing in English that I could unequivocally admire, but at around the half-way stage I started to empathise with the critics that had ruled this book more pretentious than portentous. McCarthy does however heave up the drama of his epic in the final third...only to deliver an ending that is on the half-empty side of ambiguous.

More on that in a later post. Meanwhile, it is worth saying outright that, faults and all, Blood Meridian is still a whole lot better than the best novels written on this side of the world in the past 25 years (such as Coetzee's Disgrace.) "Hit and miss verbiage" it may be, but the hits outnumber the misses significantly.

These then are the things that McCarthy is VERY good at representing:

1) Animals, especially canines

"By evening they had acquired a retinue of half a dozen wolves of varying size and color that trotted behind them singlefile and watched over their own shoulders to see that each should follow in his own place."

"Now wolves had come to follow them, great pale lobos with yellow eyes that trotted neat of foot or squatted in the shimmering heat to watch them where they made their noon halt."

2) Lunge /parry/riposte-style dialogue, always without quotation marks

"Kindly fell on hard times aint ye son? he said.
I Just aint fell on no good ones."

3) Dialect

"Aint that the drizzlin shits, he said."

4) All manner of unpleasantnesses

"The idiot was small and misshapen and his face was smeared with faeces and he sat peering at them with dull hostility silently chewing a turd."

"Later when the lamps were lit the heads in the soft glare of the uplight assumed the look of tragic masks and within a few days they would become mottled white and altogether leprous with the droppings of the birds that roosted upon them."

"They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung grey and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes."

5) Distant electrical storms and other atmospheric effects

"All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear."

"Tandem storms were blowing down-country from the north and the thunder trundled away in the distance and the air was cold and smelled of wet stone."

"About him lay only the strange coral shapes of fulgurite in their scorched furrows fused out of the sand where ball lightning had run upon the ground in the night hissing and stinking of sulphur."

"That night they could see the fire of the Mexicans reflected in the sky to the east beyond the curve of the earth."

6) Serendipitous first impressions of new townships

"Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along the bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about."

"They passed old alms-seekers by the church door with their seamy palms outheld and maimed beggars sad-eyed in rags and children asleep in the shadows with flies walking thei dreamless faces. Dark coppers in a clackdish, the shrivelled eyes of the blind. Scribes crouched by the steps with their quills and inkpots and bowls of sand and lepers moaning through the streets and naked dogs that seemed composed of bone entirely and vendors of tamales and old women with faces dark and harrowed as the land squatting in the gutters over charcoal fires where blackened strips of anonymous meat sizzled and spat. Small orphans were abroad like irate dwarfs and fools and sots drooling and flailing about in the small markets of the metropolis and the prisoners road past the carnage in the meatstalls and the waxy smell where racks of guts hung black with flies and flayings of meat in great red sheets now darkened with the advancing day and the flensed and naked skulls of cows and sheep with their dull blue eyes glaring wildly and the stiff bodies of deer and javelina and ducks and quail and parrots, all wild things from the country round hanging head downward from hooks."

7) Rural parishes

"He woke in the nave of a ruinous church, blinking up at the vaulted ceiling and the tall swagged walls with their faded frescoes. The floor of the church was deep in dried guano and the droppings of cattle and sheep. Pigeons flapped through the piers of dusty light and three buzzards hobbled about on the picked bone carcass of some animal dead in the chancel."

8) Characterful local drinking places

"The cantina was a single room and there was a hole in the ceiling where a trunk of sunlight fell through onto the the mud floor and figures crossing the room steered with care past the edge of this column of light as if it might be hot to the touch."

9) Evil

The subject perhaps, of a future post...

McCarthyisms #6

It's been said that McCarthy has a set of crutch words: preterite, anchorite etc. and that he picks words for their cadence rather than their contribution to the overall sense of a sentence. Myers groused that "like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit and miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words."

I wonder what McCarthy sounds like translated into Spanish. Certainly when García Márquez is translated into English some of his recurring pet words are translated in different ways each time they occur on the page, and even though Gabo graciously suggested that Gregory Rabassa's translation of El Otoño del Patriarca represented an improvement on his original text, you get a far clearer sense of the aesthetic effect the author was trying to achieve with sound and rhythm from the version en castellano. (A load of critics have had a good gripe about McCarthy's use of untranslated Spanish!)

Unlike lefties like Gabo and Saramago, McCarthy appears to be a radical conservative, and this means that however private and reclusive he may wish to remain, polite, educated society as a whole is probably less interested in what he has to say; in public at least. Though one would glean very little evidence from the published works of those other supposedly progressive-minded writers that they are any less pessimistic about the human condition than he is.

McCarthyisms #5

The criticisms Myers has levelled at McCarthy remind me of derogatory remarks once made by Timothy Mo about the "verbosity" of Gabriel García Márquez.

Yet in spite of his at times very dense style it would be difficult to position the Colombian Nobel-winning author within a snooty intellectual elite. Perhaps he's helped himself by penning two genuine crowd-pleasers: Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Snooty intellectuals on the other hand, are more likely to cherish The Autumn of the Patriarch, whilst Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a bit of a writer's book. (I'm sure Myers would agree that it is one piece of fiction where a complex narrative style and dramatic tension can be seen to be complementing each other rather nicely.)

Anyway, there are parts of McCarthy's Blood Meridian where the debt to magical realism seemed particularly apparent. One of these is the comma-lite Comanche attack on Captain White's party, for me the most memorable passage in the novel:

"A legion of horribles; hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armour of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many width their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in Regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."

Frogged??

McCarthyisms #4

McCarthy's novels were amongst those dissed by Brian Myers in his Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose.

Summing up why he felt that a resurgence of good-old American scorn for pretention was long overdue, Myers griped that:

"Any accessible fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to
be 'genre fiction' - at best an excellent 'read' or 'page turner' but never
literature with a capital L...Even the most obvious triteness is acceptable
provided it comes with a postmodern wink...What is not tolerated is a strong
element of action - unless, of course, the idiom is obtrusive enough to keep
suspense to a minimum."

In truth, these aren't criticisms that will easily stick to McCarthy's writing. No Country for Old Men for instance may be stylistically lighter than some of the earlier books, but it remains recognisably a McCarthy novel and it has action aplenty.

From the scene at the very start where a Sherrif's deputy is strangled with a pair of handcuffs, the body count starts to mount almost exponentially, a phenomenon I hadn't previously encountered in serious literature. In some ways it might be the most "trite" of McCarthy's novels, but that is really a side-effect of the way McCarthy has worked his elaborate, allusive way with a plot outline straight out of the Hollywood thriller genre: man finds suitcase full of cash surrounded by dead narcos. Man decides to pick it up and leave. Dead narcos' associates decide to follow him and so on.

McCarthyisms #3

These all occurred within the space of three pages.

"Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and
split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple."

A thrapple, according to Dictionary.com, is another word for the thropple or windpipe.

"The judge was standing on the rise in silhouette against the evening sun like some great balden archimandrite."

An archimandrite, according to Dictionary.com, is a senior abbot with multi-monastery responsibilities.

"He stamped his feet on the boards and flared his arms like some wild
thaumaturge out of an atavistic drama."

A thau....oh, can't be bothered.

I guess this is what Hyperwords was invented for!

McCarthyisms #2

Scott alluded to Cormac McCarthy's "King James cadence" in his comment on my last post. It's an intriguingly un-situated narrative voice that brings us these blood-red borderland shenanigans from the 1850s. It's not quite dialect, yet McCarthy does permit himself the anachronistic liberty of referring to African Americans (and his characters to Native Americans and Mexicans) as "niggers" and the mentally handicapped as "idiots" or "it".

Recently Michael Chabon spoke of McCarthy's "densely-foliated" prose in a New York Review of Books article, suggesting that in Blood Meridian "lushness of prose counterbalances aridity of setting." Well, for me at least, this lush prose tends at times to get itself a tiny bit blotto.

Indeed, in trying to invest his narrative with all the poetic trappings of a kind of apocalyptic anti-mythology, McCarthy himself repeatedly crosses back and forth across the frontier of well-judged metaphor. And sometimes I experienced the contrast between the opulence of the language and the comparatively prosaic nature of the thing being described as a sudden suspension of involvement. Some more examples:

"Those riders seemed journeyed from a legendary world and they left behind a strange tainture like an after image on the eye and the air they disturbed was altered an electric. "

"They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discreet unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whose whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds."

This next double-whammy simile is also fairly typical. The first one in the pairing just about stimulates a visceral 'visual' impression, but the second one requires more imagination, and struck me as a little superfluous. (I've heard these described as analogical similes, where the typical linking phrase − like some − sets about conjuring up an abstract/hypothetical likeness, rather than a more familiar visual one.)

"All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon."

And yet, the cadence of the sentence as a whole just seems to work, regardless of its mixed success with regard to the direct conveyance of meaning.

These are of course ultimately matters of taste and experience. One man's lushness is another's pretentiousness. My own pet-favourite composer is Prokofiev, and I'm sure there are plenty of people that would declare his works for solo piano overblown...while I get that special buzz everytime I put them on.

Apparently Cormac McCarthy is a big fan of Melville, whose Moby Dick I am yet to take on. Though according to one leading American cultural commentator "the Bing Bang wrote Moby Dick".

Sometimes McCarthy's fiction reads like the result of a Big Bang originating in the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary.

McCarthyisms #1

When not completely purple, the prose in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian has a certain evening redness of its own.

This is not, I hasten to add, a blanket criticism of an author whose talents as a scribbler are quite possibly greater than any other working in the world's favourite language. Yet as I near the end of this book, and a more serious commentary starts to take shape in my head, I have been wondering what to do about all those deliciously over-baked passages I have been marking out along the way; far more than I could realistically find a place for in my critique.

So, here they are, in daily-ish blog digest form. And the first is one I recited to my father over the weekend, extracting from him the kind of scowl he usually reserves for AA Gill's columns in the Sunday Times. ("Why use one word when you can use ten..." etc.)

"Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all."

Stick your oven thermometer in that one! If I could be bothered, I would be counting the number of times McCarthy starts a simile in Blood Meridian with "like beings...".