This book, the long-ago debut of legendary modern American novelist Cormac McCarthy, was not at all done justice my attempt to read it. I read the first half of it during the return coach journey from Sheffield to Berlin, and the coach being full of progressively inebriated economics students was probably not the best reading environment - then I had a solid two weeks of trying (and failing) to get elected, so did no reading and kind of forgot everything that I'd already read of it, and upon returning to the poor neglected book a few days ago was completely lost, but decided to slog apologetically through the remainder and promised myself that I'd just read it again properly someday.
Even given my terrible approach to this probably-excellent novel, it's not that easy to read. McCarthy's writing style is poetic, verbose, verdant, densely descriptive; it resembles painting more than prose. With a deft turn of phrase he can thrust deeply resonant and specific visions of place and person and deed into the reader's head - which he does most shockingly when narrating acts of meticulous violence. I'd prior read his haunting post-apocalyptic work The Road, and it's probably one of the best novels I ever have. His style pulls you in, fills your head with stark atmospheric landscapes and sad solitary animals and humans observed from a distance, never felt, only seen, settings and figures and actions and descriptions and memories and speech all woven together almost indistinguishable from each other but for the larger collected result of a piercing scene. This style in The Road is pure magic, because there are only two real characters and they're nameless, and the plot is fairly linear and progressive. When I found this book in a second-hand shop the day before I was to leave for Berlin I thought, hey, Cormac's a great writer, I'll get that to read on the 22-hour-each-way journey - bleh. The barely-distinct characters in their inexorably-poignant plots get called 'the man' or 'the boy' or 'the old man', similar to The Road, but here rather than just one everyman and his son going on a walk there are several dozen characters living in a range of time periods with complex relational hinges between all of them.
The style, the being-on-a-noisy-coach; I got very confused and sort of gave up trying to understand the story. I gathered that there was an outlawed bootlegger called Marion Sylder who befriends a boy called John Wesley Rattner, there was a bar called the Green Fly Inn built suspended over a ravine which unsurprisingly collapses one day, there is an old guy called Arthur Ownby who for reasons I failed to apprehend had a shootout with the police one day before running off to scrape a living selling ginseng roots, there's several wildcats who are the protagonists of their own little scenes and more than a few dogs who pop up all over the place, there's an orchard of bitter apples planted around a burnt-out pit in which is buried a car and the rotting corpse of John Wesley Rattner's father who was beaten to death by someone (maybe Marion but I didn't think he was that old). The story takes decades and hops around a lot, with blurry effectively-anonymous characters acting out sketchy ephemeral passages through the collective history of the lawless godless Tennessee countryside they all populate.
I honestly couldn't tell you a quarter of what actually happened in the novel. Maybe I'm not supposed to be able to? Maybe it's simply a lengthy experiment in description and scene-setting, which McCarthy is incomparably beautifully good at, coupled with an overall wistful dry recognition of the odd suspensions between a continuous place and an ever-changing set of mortal creatures which occasionally commit murderous actions. Maybe it's that and the actual story doesn't matter so much? I feel that might be right. Maybe it's just a bad novel? No, absolutely not, I just read it very badly indeed.
Sorry Cormac McCarthy, and sorry to my followers - I can't legitimately recommend this book as a novel, though hopefully I will be able to next time I attempt it. Regardless, I can vouch for it as a painting of words, for which it is truly beautiful. Even my distracted disengaged self was swept along by the torrents and droughts of detail that make up the real weight of the book.
Even given my terrible approach to this probably-excellent novel, it's not that easy to read. McCarthy's writing style is poetic, verbose, verdant, densely descriptive; it resembles painting more than prose. With a deft turn of phrase he can thrust deeply resonant and specific visions of place and person and deed into the reader's head - which he does most shockingly when narrating acts of meticulous violence. I'd prior read his haunting post-apocalyptic work The Road, and it's probably one of the best novels I ever have. His style pulls you in, fills your head with stark atmospheric landscapes and sad solitary animals and humans observed from a distance, never felt, only seen, settings and figures and actions and descriptions and memories and speech all woven together almost indistinguishable from each other but for the larger collected result of a piercing scene. This style in The Road is pure magic, because there are only two real characters and they're nameless, and the plot is fairly linear and progressive. When I found this book in a second-hand shop the day before I was to leave for Berlin I thought, hey, Cormac's a great writer, I'll get that to read on the 22-hour-each-way journey - bleh. The barely-distinct characters in their inexorably-poignant plots get called 'the man' or 'the boy' or 'the old man', similar to The Road, but here rather than just one everyman and his son going on a walk there are several dozen characters living in a range of time periods with complex relational hinges between all of them.
The style, the being-on-a-noisy-coach; I got very confused and sort of gave up trying to understand the story. I gathered that there was an outlawed bootlegger called Marion Sylder who befriends a boy called John Wesley Rattner, there was a bar called the Green Fly Inn built suspended over a ravine which unsurprisingly collapses one day, there is an old guy called Arthur Ownby who for reasons I failed to apprehend had a shootout with the police one day before running off to scrape a living selling ginseng roots, there's several wildcats who are the protagonists of their own little scenes and more than a few dogs who pop up all over the place, there's an orchard of bitter apples planted around a burnt-out pit in which is buried a car and the rotting corpse of John Wesley Rattner's father who was beaten to death by someone (maybe Marion but I didn't think he was that old). The story takes decades and hops around a lot, with blurry effectively-anonymous characters acting out sketchy ephemeral passages through the collective history of the lawless godless Tennessee countryside they all populate.
I honestly couldn't tell you a quarter of what actually happened in the novel. Maybe I'm not supposed to be able to? Maybe it's simply a lengthy experiment in description and scene-setting, which McCarthy is incomparably beautifully good at, coupled with an overall wistful dry recognition of the odd suspensions between a continuous place and an ever-changing set of mortal creatures which occasionally commit murderous actions. Maybe it's that and the actual story doesn't matter so much? I feel that might be right. Maybe it's just a bad novel? No, absolutely not, I just read it very badly indeed.
Sorry Cormac McCarthy, and sorry to my followers - I can't legitimately recommend this book as a novel, though hopefully I will be able to next time I attempt it. Regardless, I can vouch for it as a painting of words, for which it is truly beautiful. Even my distracted disengaged self was swept along by the torrents and droughts of detail that make up the real weight of the book.
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