. Spinning .

McCarthy opens this book with one new, one oft-used technique of his here: movement. 

A boy is sleeping, his father reaches out and touches him.  This is unusual tenderness from McCarthy or his characters.   Amid the greyness of a barren dawn, the bond between the two is thus established from page one.

But they are on a journey, waking up after spending a night alongside a desolate road that still hints of danger, hinted at by both the father’s nightmare and his binocular viewing of the morning.  In several other books, there is a road, or a path, a boat, a walk, a gypsy caravan. 

Movement, motion; McCarthy’s promise to take us from here to there despite the scenery painted a gloom of grey.

It’s off the shelf and on the coffee table:  Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I deserve it. 

Yesterday between the pies and turkey, I finished reading Cormac MacCarthy’s No Country.  And I’m still thinkin’ on it.

Despite the action of the story, there is some depth of human nature here; as with most McCarthy, it dwells on the evil side.  We have Sheriff Bell, a sometimes first-person narrator of both events of the story, and of his own philosophies and worries about life.  He’s getting older, he’s facing criminals who are more daring, more flamboyant, more conscienceless than ever before.  Retirement to a happy home life with a wife he dearly loves and cherishes, and facing his own demons of his actions in war seems to be set upon a balancing scale of what he sees going on with the drama of Moss and Chigurh and the drug dealers.  Simply put, the world is going to hell in a handbasket and with this, it softens it to an aging mental frame of mind.

But Anton Chigurh still intrigues me somewhat.  He too, it seems, is a philosopher.  With little respect for human life other than his own–and maybe that too is not that valuable–he appears to kill without care.  And yet, his conversations with Moss, with Wells, and with Moss’ wife, Carla Jean seem to imply a more complex road to his decisions.  He wants to tell his victims how he is, and how life is, and how wrong they were to think it any different than meaningless.  But is this it–or is it that he’s really seeking someone who can tell him that he’s the one that’s wrong about it all. 

Chigurh claims he has no enemies.  True, because he doesn’t leave them alive.  But I see something else; I see him saying that he has no one who can call him a liar.  In disappointment at their half-hearted attempts to argue and so convince him otherwise, he kills them.  This validates his reasoning.  And yet he goes on killing, seeking answers and never finding them. I see him hoping for some conclusive revelation that runs concurrent with Sheriff Bell’s decision to retire.

Not the prose of previous novels, and not the mystery (except in keeping track of who is opening up a scene), and not up to the levels of Blood Meridian, or Suttree, or Child of God, but still, better than a whole lot of what’s out there.

While I shouldn’t complain that McCarthy has decided to use plotting in its simplest form, I’ve got to say that the story the plots lead us through doesn’t quite sit right with me.

Of course I’m used to McCarthy enough now to not depend upon his characters to do the obvious, but I do wonder why Llewelyn would a) direct his wife to go to Odessa to stay with her mother, realizing who he’s up against–just doesn’t seem a safe place for her to hide out; b) call Wells for help (and end up talking to Chigurh, who has just killed Wells) even though the guy seemed nice and wanted to help him, he’s still one of the bad guys; and c) wander out of the hospital without clothes or shoes and try to get across the border that way in a cab.

Once McCarthy has decided to go the "normal" route of mystery adventure, his characters shouldn’t be doing dumb things. 

That’s for the hour-long TV shows, where it can possibly slide right by the viewing audience.

Does this look like Cormac McCarthy to you?  Forgive the fuzzy photo; I couldn’t click fast enough because the pages wouldn’t stay open.

But the short sentences?  The loads of white space?  True, this is dialogue and Southwestern talk at that (this is a compliment, folks), and the punctuation in typical McCarthy style is missing, but I’m so used to pages where the text covers the page in flowing descriptive narrative that establishes mood.  Here, he establishes mood, reveals character, progresses plot and gives just a tad of backstory in dialogue.

It’s brilliantly done and yet, why do I feel cheated?

Yes, I learned that term in new media I’m sure, and have come up against it again in movie-making.  It’s interesting how once you catch the meaning of a term, you begin to notice it all over the place–but in a McCarthy book?

Why I’m doubtful is that McCarthy usually has several characters moving through the book from the beginning, and No Country is no exception.  But he has just introduced two new characters, halfway through the story, that we kind of knew existed, but knew nothing about them at all:  the drug dealers and the paid-killers who love ‘em.   

The office was on the seventeenth floor with a view over the skyline of Houston and the open lowlands to the ship channel and the bayou beyond.  Colonies of silver tanks.  Gas flares, pale in the day.  When Wells showed up the man told him to come in and told him to shut the door.  He didn’t even turn around.  He could see Wells in the glass.  Wells shut the door and stood with his hands crossed before him at the wrist.  The way a funeral director might stand.  (p. 139)

This doesn’t come as a separate section, it simply follows a shootout between the dope dealer Chigurh and our young man on the run, Moss.  Notice the way McCarthy brings in this "meanwhile, back at the ranch" via the setting.  An office building in the city sounds worlds away from the backroads through lava ridges and cattlegates that we’ve been through with Moss and Sheriff Bell.  So we move through setting first, and meet a different set of characters as well.  These folks don’t talk the same either.  They’re smooth, they’re formal, they’re the big guys.

McCarthy also manages to inject some humor here, when Wells, obviously a hit man, asks the man who is paying him, "I wondered if I could get my parking ticket validated."

Again here, there is much told in conversation that is quite different than McCarthy’s usual minimal dialogue from the loner-type characters of his other novels.  And, it intricately progresses the story without feeling like it’s infodump. 

Not particularly taken with this novel, though the story works since it’s not all that strange.  A young man, Llewelyn Moss,  comes upon a drug deal gone bad, dead dealers and deader cars, but a stash of heroin and two million bucks.  He takes the money and obviously needs to run from pissed-off dealers and the law.  Interwoven is a story of the lawman who tries to find him, Sheriff Bell, and one bad dude named Chigurh. 

So far, very typical of McCarthy’s stories: three men wandering half the book towards each other without realizing it.  That’s conflict, and it’s building because they’re bound to meet up.

What’s very unMcCarthy is the short sentence structure, the depth he brings to his characters without holding back about whether they’re good guys or bad guys.  How long did it take me to see Blood Meridian’s Judge as evil?  My opinion of Suttree kept threatening to change. Even in the Orchard Keeper I reserved full judgement until I’d stood by and watched a few too many folks get killed.  There’s a lot of dialogue in this novel as well, and it’s directly progressing the story, and it’s short sentence-structure–very realistic I would say.

One more thing that’s different.  It’s accessible.  Unless McCarthy has buried meaning so deep below the surface that I just can’t find it, I don’t really see too much beyond a good story right now.  An adventure story, with good characters, and a good plot. 

But where’s the beef?

Where he reached the river it made a broad sweep out of a canyon and carried down past great stands of carrizo cane.  Downriver it washed up against a rock bluff and then bore away to the south.  Darkness deep in the canyon.  The water dark.  He dropped into the cut and fell and rolled and rose and began to make his way down a long sandy ridge toward the river. (p. 32)

Only McCarthy would describe the landscape as a man is running for his life.

This seems to bother some people.  The tie that McCarthy has with the land that makes it so important in his stories.  I love it.  The canvas, the field, the necessary plane on which all life and color move.

McCarthy is a master at piqueing your interest right from the opening line:

I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Hunstsville.  One and only one.  (p. 3)

This is an intro in first person pov from a sheriff.  Within a page, we are switched to immediate action (not the usual McCarthy way) and introducted to Chigurh:

He dropped his cuffed hands over the deputy’s head and leaped into the air and slammed both knees against the back of the deputy’s neck and hauled back on the chain.  (p. 5)

McCarthy’s way is graphic violence, but not usually quite so early on.  We’re not quite sure yet if the "boy" in the first two pages is going to turn out to be Chigurh (which I’m pronouncing "Chigger") but we know that all characters tie in together eventually.  What McCarthy just can’t leave be is timeline.  He loves dropping us in the middle of something and often amid some unsavory characters and putting us at that disadvantage, we’re bound to his story to find out what’s going on. 

Now that’s tension.

Oddly enough, though this is likely the first time I’m concurrently reading two novels, the two I’ve chosen start out in first person pov as an introduction, then switch to third to begin the main body of the book.  Edith Wharton, in Ethan Frome, chooses to title this first section as an intro; Cormac McCarthy, in No Country, separates it out by the use of italics and a blank space at the bottom of the page (we all know McCarthy, he’s declared a moratorium on punctuation so why should we expect section headings?). 

Curiouser still–though I’m not positive with No Country as yet–in both, the main character is introduced by that first person pov, so we know a bit about him as seen through a contemporary and are ready for him with some preconceived notions when he shows up in the next section.

It’s but another tool used by an experienced writer that enhances characterization.

Couldn’t stay away from it, with it’s shades of red cover, crisp white lettering, faded silhouette of a running man…and of course, McCarthy’s like a Willie-fantasy for the literary part of my brain.  So No Country for Old Men will be read alongside Ethan Frome.

Edith Wharton’s Frome is what I’d consider an easy read–especially after Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, and yes, McCarthy.  There does not seem to be multi-layers of meanings woven through the story, although I’m not saying it’s one-dimensional.  Even the simplest phrase can be taken many ways, but when something is written by the author as straightforward story, while it will contain those nuances of the author’s own subconsciousness and allow for the reader’s own, it doesn’t necessarily hold questions that reach far beyond the story itself.

Not so with McCarthy.  Perhaps his own reticent social nature touches his writing; you have a feeling he’s not telling all, but subtly his thoughts come through.  The reader may discover these breadcrumbs to follow a different trail as well as hack through new trails of his own.

Besides, I’m waiting for some philosophy books to come in, so there’s some down-time.  And, if I’m still on McCarthy, he’s likely one of the best candidates to go along with a philosophical study.

For me, the story seems to end here:

Neither spoke until they saw the dog and that was very near to the pike, on the last turn above the gate.  They had overtaken it and even in the few minutes in which he was allowed to watch it alive Gifford was struck by its behavior.  It was walking in the wheelruts with an exotic delicacy, like a trained dog on a rope, and holding its head so far back, its nose near perpendicular, that Gifford looked up instinctively to see what threat might be materializing out of the sky.  The shovel bounced in the road with a dull bong and when he turned it was in time only to see Legwater recoil under the shotgun and to recoil himself as the muzzleblast roared in his ears.  He spun and saw the dog lurch forward, still holding up its head, slew sideways and fold up in the dust of the road. (p. 241)

The Orchard Keeper begins with a man walking down a dusty road, and at the time I read it, I had the feeling and remarked that amid the expanse of horizon and the wide split of earth and sky, the story would come down to the fine grains of dust that were the reality of life.  And so it would seem to be true.

The man’s ashes, his dust, is shoveled and blows in the wind to cover the digger as well as the trees that surround the burial pit.  This same man, who has been a part of the lives of all the main characters has lain silently throughout the story as it unravels in their walking around him, by him, to him.  Sylder has buried him, Uncle Ather protects him, and his son finds him a boyhood fascination until his identity is discovered and still, he ends up a lie.

Who is the cat?  And who does the new watcher, the faithful hound, Scout, represent as he leaves his own bones in the trail?

Lots of other meanings here, lots of layers of dust.  Now dust piles up, but dust also blows away.  What’s constant lies beneath it all, and yet it is hidden, revealed, and never looks quite the same.

I’m not quite ready to write a finale on this novel.  Perhaps there is a touch of disappointment after having first read McCarthy’s finer pieces. 

When finishing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, I was struck by how cleverly all the threads he had strung throughout the book were neatly tied up at the end.  In The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy seems to do this, but it is, to me, a bit bordering on authorly telling as well as a neat, justified resolution.  Marion Sylder goes to jail for running whiskey, and Uncle Ather goes to jail–subsequently ending up in a mental institution–for shooting up government property.  John Wesley Rattner stays free of the law, and we’re not sure what he’s learned from his relationship with either of the two men.  His father’s skeleton is found, and its identity surmised, though there is a question of whether it’s truly him because he may have lied to his wife about a plate in his head. 

There is McCarthy’s dark humor here, as a greedy officer, Legwater, sifts through the ashes where the remains were burnt to find the valuable metal plate.  Stirring up the old to cover the new with its dustly touch?

More, as Uncle Ather’s old hound dog, Scout, appears almost ghostly through the woods where he spent the whole novel walking beside his master.  Shot by Legwater and killed; when we didn’t think he’d make it on his own very long and wonder how he survived when Ather was taken into custody.  I still cringe when I see him standing forlorn on the road, padding behind the car that takes Ather away.

I don’t need to agree with why McCarthy’s characters do what they do; this is who they are.  I’ve never found myself arguing with him over a lack of realism in their strange comings and goings.  But there’s a touch of unfulfillment with The Orchard Keeper.  Even to the point of wondering why, with a peach tree here, and a green apple or two dropping there, we’ve climbed mostly through mountains or onto a stool at the bar back in town.

More later.

In the mountains where Marion Sylder runs whiskey, John Wesley Rattners hunts and traps, Uncle Ather ceaselessly walks to oversee and keep track of changes, there is a painter cat who does what predators do; survives by stalking and killing prey.

Softly and with a slow grace her leathered footpads fell, hind tracking fore with a precision profoundly feline, a silken movement where her shoulders rolled, haunches swayed.  (p. 216)

When Uncle Ather is taken into custody for shooting up a government tank and shooting a few officers who come to arrest him, he is visited by a government agent who tells him he is there to help him, seeking information about this strange old man.  He leaves, somewhat unfulfilled and totally at a loss to understand Ather.

The agent thanked the desk sargeant as he passed through the outer room.  He swung the briefcase to his left hand and dabbed his handerkerchief upon his forehead.  Over the worn runner on the flagged hall floor his steps were soundless and he moved with a slender grace of carriage, delicate and feline.  (p. 222)

Though the cat, and the man, are not the likeable characters, they are both necessary in the playout of their environments.

It is obvious that McCarthy uses his extraordinary skill with language to paint the settings of his stories in rich and deeply intense detail that intimates a close love and knowledge of nature.

Then he was straddle-legged with one foot on the bank and the other in the creek, the water boiling between his legs, ribboning high on his calf.  He got the other foot down and turned, carefully, facing upstream, standing with the thin brown wings of water flying over his shins with a slicing sound, standing so in an illusion of fantastic motion.  (p.178)

But several places in this book, and after the deadly, almost living river of Suttree, I wonder why McCarthy always paints his water brown.  Here in particular, a creek, away from the muddying debris of man, seemingly safe in the cool forested mountain, a fast moving body fed by the rains, yet it carries the undercurrent of evil perhaps, just as all the other workings of life; such as man.