Fiction: The cryptic terrain of Cormac McCarthy is filled with violence and menace and interspersed between the litany of gun blasts and gore are McCarthy's attempts to look at life and the world, writes Eileen Battersby.
High above the desert, a young man is hunting antelope along the Rio Grande. The heels of his boots dig into "the volcanic gravel of the ridge" as he scans the landscape beneath. It only takes a couple of sentences of that familiar ragged, staccato prose - "Far to the south the raw mountains of Mexico. The breaks of the river. To the west the baked terracotta terrain of the rising borderlands. He spat dryly and wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his cotton workshirt" - to set the scene and the world settles into the terse, hazardously cryptic terrain of Cormac McCarthy. It is a place in which violence and menace dictate the action, and offer the sole motivation for most of the characters.
Ignore the graceful lamentation suggested by the Yeatsian title. No one can survive with honour in McCarthy country; the romantic fail and only the most depraved can endure. This new novel, his first since Cities of the Plains, the disappointing finale to his "Border Trilogy" which began so well with All The Pretty Horses and continued so magnificently in The Crossing, returns to the risible melodrama of Cities of the Plains - and things get steadily worse.
Be warned, in this new book McCarthy has decided to include long, folksy passages of self-discovery as offered by a weary older man, Sheriff Bell, who has begun to understand life with its multiple failures and secrets.
The difficulty with profundity is that it all too often collapses into at best pretension and, at worst, as it often does here, unintentional humour.
Therein lies the difference between McCarthy and Annie Proulx. When she fails, she can always fall back on her gruff, earthy humour. McCarthy can't because he has no humour, only Jacobean excess.
Moss, the anti-hero, is foiled in his efforts to kill the retreating antelope, but he finds something else. "Dried blood black on the ground. He stopped and listened. Nothing. The drone of flies"; dead men surrounded by a cargo of dope and a great deal of cash. But Moss seems curiously unmoved. When he discovers that one of the massacre victims is not yet dead, and asking for water, he shows no mercy.
He studies the case full of money. "His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel."
It quickly becomes a classic tale of temptation in the desert. He sets off home where his bored young wife is waiting. A night's sleep doesn't allow him to forget. Back he goes to the scene of someone else's crime, that quickly becomes his own.
Except that it doesn't. McCarthy decides to shape this thin story into yet another of his variations on the theme of heroic quest.
As for the inevitable violence and blood lust, it has already been introduced in the form of Chigurh, a hit man, who as the novel opens, has been arrested and is, it seems, under control. He brutally murders the deputy. McCarthy provides a characteristic description. "The deputy's right carotid artery burst and a jet of blood shot across the room and hit the wall and ran down it." By the next page, having stolen the dead deputy's car keys, Chigurh, the demon who dominates the book to a far greater extent than Moss, the aspiring sneak thief, has committed the second of his many killings.
By the time McCarthy's fifth novel, Blood Meridian, was published in Britain in 1989, some four years after its US publication, he was regarded by some critics as the master of a dour, determinedly poetic primitativism that hearkened back to an earlier time. It was as if the American west of the 19th century had finally found a lofty intelligence intent on chronicling the savagery as well as the mythical romance of that period. McCarthy made the territory of the Texas/Mexican borderlands his own. This was the point at which two traditions met and merged.
Blood Meridian exposes the brutal realism undercutting the myths of the US west. In it, a young drifter, known as The Kid, begins an aimless life of killing. At the age of 14, "he can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man".
That singular novel, surreal and weighty, appeared to challenge the traditional quest narrative. The Kid falls in with various marauding gangs, crazed killers and bounty hunters who roam the desert butchering Indians, Mexicans, other cowboys and each other. Aside from killing, The Kid is committed to his own survival. There are no dreamers, no heroes. Blood Meridian somehow acquires an apocalyptic grandeur through the Miltonic prose.
In All The Pretty Horses (1992), set in the mid-20th century, McCarthy reworked the quest theme of Blood Meridian. It became a love story, one boy's romance with the dream of becoming a cowboy. Instead of The Kid, there was John Grady Cole, an old-style hero doomed to suffer for his dreams. Less relentlessly brutal than Blood Meridian, the narrative is more humane if ever alert to the viciousness of men.
By the publication of The Crossing in 1994, it was obvious McCarthy was prepared to take immense chances. There was a terrifying and naive honesty about his theatrical use of language in describing the good and evil of men.
Somehow, McCarthy reached for the heavens - and connected. The Crossing remains one of the staggeringly awesome achievements of 20th century US literature. It is also McCarthy's masterpiece, the book in which his lush quasi-Biblical prose and feverishly intense descriptions of landscape and nature, soar.
However, he is an earnest, dogged writer - not a natural artist; the mannered tightrope he walks as a novelist is thin indeed. Cities of the Plain (1999) exposed exactly how fragile his monochromatic, stilted, bizarre and narrow style is. Throughout it, the dialogue is so embarrassingly poor, that exchanges made at moments of high tension explode into bathos.
The same heavy-handedness stalks this drab new book. Set in the 1980s, No Country For Old Men. it reads like a doomed screenplay that could just possibly be salvaged if turned into a black comedy.
It consists of Moss and his careful, always futile efforts to hide the stolen cash, staunch his latest wound and, oh yes, escape the deranged killer who is hunting him. Countless murders occur, many are random, a few are planned as the stagy Chigurh pursues his prey from motel to motel. He also tends his various wounds, actively encouraging his victims to engage in their own deaths. "'I want you to look at me,' he orders. He [the victim] looked at Chigurh. He looked at the new day paling all about. Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in that squandered world'"
Interspersed between the litany of gun blasts and gore are McCarthy's attempts to look at life and the world. Perhaps this is why the narrative is so despairing, so ill-conceived? Late in the book, Sheriff Bell asks a waitress if the evening paper has arrived. "'I don't know,' she said. 'I quit readin it'." The waitress goes on to as the sheriff "when was the last time you read somethin about Jesus Christ in the newspaper?" to which the sheriff replys "I guess I'd have to say it would be a while". Is McCarthy attempting to articulate a philosophical redundancy?
Emblazoned on the dust jacket is a reviewer's quote, proclaiming: "It's hard to think of a contemporary American writer more worth reading." Funny, it's a lot more difficult to think of a major contemporary American writer who has been left more obviously behind by his stylistic, thematic and tonal limitations.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
No Country For Old Men. By Cormac McCarthy, Picador, 309pp, £16.99