Somewhere down below I wrote a post praising Cormac McCarthy's book No Country for Old Men. However, I did wonder at the time whether I was still under the influence of the Coen brothers' film and the tremendous performance of Tommy Lee Jones. Both the book and the film are a long lament for past and passing times. The malevolence of the monstrous hit-man character is quite literally, diabolical, and the story is almost Lear-like in its bleak nihilism. Anyway, to check my first impressions, I bought a Picador paper-back edition called The Border Trilogy which contains the following stories: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, excellent value for £10.99. I have just finished reading the first book.
I do not claim to be much in the way of a literary critic. As most of you know, I do not 'do' novels; my reading is either cheap 'pulp fiction', or non-fiction, so if I make a chump of myself - again - just put it down to inexperience as well as lack of literary taste. The first thing that leaps from the page is McCarthy's intense romanticism. He loves the deserts and mountains of southern Texas and Mexico and such is his exactitude in using the correct names for the flora and fauna, that it makes it hard work for an outsider to know whether he is referring to a tree, a cactus or a shrub. I had assumed that he had grown up in that area but according to his biography on the net, he only moved there fairly late in life. This explains his passion - it is the passion of the convert!
Days to come they road through the mountains and they crossed at a barren windgap and sat the horses among the rocks and looked out over the country to the south where the last shadows were running over the land before the wind and the sun to the west lay blood red among the shelving clouds and the distant cordilleras ranged down the terminals of the sky to fade from pale to pale of blue and then nothing at all.
Similarly, the bond between man and horse is stressed repeatedly and with great emotional force. In contrast, the emotional love (I use the word because 'friendship' seems inadequate but I should stress that it is not in any way sexual) between the two teen-age lads of his story is never explicitly stated. They are both almost monosyllabic in their speech, so it is mainly by their actions that you understand their love for each other. Finally, there is the love of the young hero for the daughter of a Mexican grandee which holds the centre of this tragic, Romeo and Juliet tale. Again, McCarthy forgoes hyperbole and allows the reader to feel the power of their love for each other mostly by simply narrative. But again and again, McCarthy returns to the land, the rivers, the (again) Lear-like storms, the brilliant sunsets and dawns, and the long horizons.
The book is, as one might expect, I suppose, tremendously American. Not the real America, but the ideal America from that potent mix of memory, myth and reality which lies at the heart of how Americans like to think of themselves. The writing was too rich for me to chew and swallow at one sitting, after all, Shakespeare apart, I'm not used to literature, but taken in small bite-size portions it was superb. Of course, McCarthy continues to despise the use of inverted commas, but you soon get used to it. Anyway, I shall never forget young John Grady Cole, the hero of this tale, but I almost dread reading the next two stories for fear of what his fate holds.
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