The Orchard Keeper

Written by: Cormac McCarthy












If only most novels were as good as Cormac McCarthy's first novel.

Set during prohibition, "The Orchard Keeper" weaves together the lives of three characters, connected first by a circumstance of which none of them are aware and later by their mutual contempt for the law.

Like a pitcher warming up before a baseball game, McCarthy's first novel is not quite up to his usual standards, but you can still see hints of what is to come later.  The voice of the prose is not quite fine-tuned yet, but is obviously distinct.  This is not a criticism, but merely an observation.

As a writer, McCarthy mastered early the ability to let the characters and their circumstances carry their own gravity.  He assumes that his reader is intelligent and can make important connections without those connections being explicitly outlined or discussed.  For example: whose body is Uncle Ather hiding?  It's obvious, so it is never outright declared.  Few writers would be so bold as to leave such an important detail unnamed, but it seems natural - if not necessary - for McCarthy to do so.

I'm not sure whether or not this would be a good place to start for newcomers to McCarthy's work.  On the one hand, it's a solid general sampling of what his work is usually like.  On the other hand, it's not one of his best pieces. (Although, on a side note, I feel like comparing his books to one another is a futile venture akin to comparing Hall of Fame baseball players.  Is it fair to compare Joe DiMaggio to Hank Aaron?  No.  They were both amazing at what they did, and there's no value added by making the comparison.)

The Sunset Limited

Directed by: Tommy Lee Jones

Written by: Cormac McCarthy

There are very few writers who, by mere drop of their name, can make me sit up and pay attention. Cormac McCarthy is one of those writers. He adapted his own "novel in dramatic form" into a screenplay, which was then produced as an HBO special.

The plot is very simple: two men - known only as Black and White (Jackson and Jones, respectively) - sit in a room and debate the meaning of life. Prior to the opening scene, White tried to kill himself by jumping in front of a train but Black intervened and saved his life. Throughout their discussions, White (who reveals himself as a professor) points to the bleak sadness of life and the brutality of humanity. Black ( regularly counterpoints by pointing to humanity's redeeming qualities and the importance of faith. The power dynamic shifts back and forth repeatedly until, almost arbitrarily, it ends. The two part ways, neither side convinced by the other's arguments.

Going into it, one should know that McCarthy's writings are always incredibly dark and heavy, and "The Sunset Limited" is no exception. White beats the audience over the head with his depression and pessimism, and it can be emotionally draining to hear it, even in a performance. (And, to give credit, Tommy Lee Jones is pretty convincing in his role.)

I always enjoy movies with relatively ambiguous endings. (That isn't to say a film doesn't need resolution, but that it should always leave a few things for the audience to think about.) "The Sunset Limited" ends in a way that leaves things up for discussion. When White finally leaves, it is clear that Black's faith has been shaken but unbroken. Even though we never see him again, it's easy to conjecture (possibly incorrectly) that a similar change has happened to White. But what does it all mean? Who was right? Did either side "win"? Or is it even about winning at all?

Both Jones and Jackson give well-executed performances, although the nature of the story - taking place in a single sparse room on a single night - leaves little room for them in terms of action. Instead, they use their voices and the words they carry as their instruments. It was not a lot to work with, but they made it work.

Typically, McCarthy's works are filled with physical violence. "The Sunset Limited" is filled with emotional and philosophical violence. The two characters bludgeon each other with their points of view, hitting each other with point and counterpoint, ad nauseum.

"The Sunset Limited" is excellent, but I would not categorize it as a must-see film. Be prepared for an emotional roller-coaster if you do decide to watch it, but one that is well worth the experience.

Blood Meridian

It took me a while to slug through it, but I finally finished reading Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel "Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West." It was a brutal read, both in regards to the text and the mental energy expended to read it, but I finish it with a sense of smugness that I have tackled some literary monster.

The book loosely follows the journeys of a character known only as "the kid" and traces his life around his encounters with the antagonist character - Judge Holden (almost exclusively referred to as "the judge"). The two characters' fates are irreversibly intertwined after the judge rescues the kid from a Mexican prison in return for the kid joining the judge's band of scalp-hunters. Most of the novel then follows the scalp-hunters killing sprees, until they are finally ambushed and mostly killed. The few survivors are hunted down, one-by-one, by the judge, until the kid is the only one left. (At this point, the kid is suddenly referred to as "the man" - suggesting that he is beyond the edge of innocence.) In the final scene, the judge has tracked down the kid / the man down in Texas and, although the kid's fate is left unknown and ambiguous, we are left with the impression that the judge has slaughtered him too.

To me, "Blood Meridian" hearkens back to an earlier era of writing - to the era of Herman Melville and (to an extent) Joseph Conrad. Much of the writing is consumed by descriptions of the landscape and weather, with the characters merely traversing these settings. Dialogue is kept to a minimum, with most of the conversations being short and consisting of questions and responses. Yet, eventually, we learn about our characters, even though they are not necessarily the foreground of the picture much of the time. Extended metaphors are also a rarity (which fits with the characters of the novel who are mostly uneducated grunts). The book has a few "extended monologues" though, which remind me of Conrad's regular narrator of Marlowe. This style, then, is well-crafted and exhibits McCarthy's fantastic ability to manipulate the written word to serve his purpose, and it is evident why many critics view "Blood Meridian" as his masterpiece.

The character of Judge Holden was brutal but beautifully created. He is, among all the characters, the one who transcends the intelligence of all the others. He keeps a journal where he documents everything he comes across, trying to learn as much as he can about everything he can. He uses logic and reasoning with the rest of the gang, who are often confused by his statements. Yet, he is also an inherently evil character. It is implied repeatedly (including through his relationship with the kid) that he is a pedophile, and it is explicit that he is a child murderer and a calculated homicidal maniac. He repeatedly refers to the pervasiveness of violence throughout culture, claiming at one point (in essence) that men are not men if they have not been to war and drawn blood. To me, he represents the devil in all his deception and violence. There is even a moment when, while explaining why he documents everything he sees and does, the judge declares that the fact that anything exists without his permission and beyond his control is an insult to him - which reminds me of a passage from Milton's "Paradise Lost" (although I cannot recall the line verbatim).

The novel's ambiguous ending - with the kid's fate left unresolved - was quite a shock to me. Although much of the action of the book had been left ambiguous, I suppose I was expecting some kind of secure resolution, some sense of closure. Yet, the lack of clarity is also a fitting ending to a book which moves through a haze of uncertainty - we're never quite sure where exactly the kid came from, why he was chosen by the judge, what happens to many of the characters. The only thing we know for certain at the end is that the judge survives in all his madness (perhaps still survives, the last line suggests - adding to the impression that he is an evil beyond the earth).

One final note: although much of the action of the book is implied, most of the descriptions of locations and scenes of the book are incredibly explicit. This detail includes the slaughter, dismemberment, and scalping of several people. McCarthy's prose leaves nothing to the imagination in regards to the brutality of these based-on-reality events. This novel is not for the feint-of-heart or weak-of-stomach. I found this brutality interesting, though, in contrast with the way death is treated in most westerns (especially in film). More often than not, someone is shot with a puff of smoke and falls over stiffly. In reality, though, bodies were disfigured, ears and scalps kept as souvenirs, and conflicts were bloody and messy. McCarthy does not stray from reality, and the reader is left with a few horrific images to think about.

The Road

A few days ago I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Road"(first published in 2006), but it has taken me a few days to really absorb it.

You'd think that with a cover like this, I would have at least a hint of the unnerving bleakness that was the theme of the book. But you'd be wrong.

The novel is set in a post-unnamed-cataclysm world, in which some catastrophe has led to the atmosphere being encased in a smoky cloud cover, effectively killing all the world's plant life (and, thereby, all the world's animal life). The few remaining humans are left to scrounge the earth for the remaining cans of food and other resources, such as fuel for fires (because, apparently, without the sun, it gets pretty cold during winter).

Through this dark world (pun intended), the reader follows a peripatetic man and his son, as they relentlessly follow a tattered map to the coast, where the man has hung his last best hope of finding any sort of civilization (although it is clear to the readers that this hope is completely unfounded in this fictional reality).

A story about a relatively silent man and boy walking around in a world without sunlight would be pretty boring. To add intrigue, then, McCarthy has them encounter various other survivors and horrific situations including a bit of cannibalism (because humans are the last source of meat on earth). This book is not for the faint of heart. McCarthy's prose is as stark and as brutal as the story described, but also hauntingly beautiful - as if the descriptions and metaphors used would be the type of literature a survivor would write.

The book itself is chilling in the way it portrays many of the darker sides of the way we live today, as well as presenting terrible choices that nobody hopes to ever make. In a dying world, would you be the type of person to keep surviving through the killing of others, or to kill yourself (which is what the man tells the boy to do if he were ever to be confronted by the cannibals), or to just keep moving on and clinging to baseless hopes? Would you rather wander the earth silently on your own to eventually die by yourself, or would you take a companion or join a group and risk their betrayal the next time the food runs short? After reading a scene in which the boy drinks what is perhaps the last soda in their molding world, I slowed down to savor my next Dr. Pepper and appreciated something I so often take for granted.

I am still puzzled by the novel's final passage, regarding the trout that once swam in the world's streams. The book ends with the line "In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed with mystery." It is the only point in the book which does not focus on the man or the boy (or, does it?), and I am not quite sure how I am supposed to feel about it. (Based on the rest of the novel, though, I doubt it's meant to make the reader feel bright and bubbly.)

I will not soon forget this book, its words, and the characters and world and images it presents. One passage in particular strikes me as one morbidly worth sharing and contemplating (although I don't know why):

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the interstate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (p 130)

Harsh sentiment, good writing.