A lyric poet of horror and chaos: the dark brilliance of Cormac McCarthy
No modern novelist was as utterly wedded to the apocalyptic sublime as Cormac McCarthy, who has died aged 89 at his home in New Mexico. Throughout a career in fiction that generated 12 novels and two plays and spawned a number of excellent film adaptations, McCarthy’s muse was always the abyss. He wrote about the darkness, violence, horror and chaos he perceived at the core of all creation – not with the hysterical terror of HP Lovecraft, but with an ecstatic lyricism more like that of Muslim mystic-poets rapturously praising their holy-beloved.
Beginning with The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965 when McCarthy was in his early 30s, and concluding with the late-career diptych of novels The Passengerand Stella Maristhat materialised last year after a 15year break, McCarthy’s fiction was animated by an unrelenting pessimism regarding human nature and our place in the cosmos that puts his work violently at odds with the progressivist optimism that has become orthodoxy to contemporary literary culture. A deranged utterance from his most unforgettable creation, the Luciferian Judge Holden in Blood Meridian – “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” – has become a meme-slogan of the internet age, signifier of the ancient ecstatics of excess, carnage and madness, the lust for mayhem and atrocity that persists in the foundations of rationalist enterprise and the bright town squares of the online.
It was that novel – his fifth, published in 1985 – that exploded McCarthy’s reputation, and which may prove to be his most enduring work. While violence and bloodlust had always featured in his fictive visions, Blood Meridianwas an unprecedented and visionary bloodbath, a revisionist western that depicted the US-Mexico borderlands of the mid-1800s as a site of such epic, extravagant savagery that it was as if hell had breached the parched desert surface to gush and pour its molten fires across the blood-soaked earth.
The picturesque, idyllic title of the novel that followed seven years later, All the Pretty Horses, seems almost like a joke after the volcanic carnage and soaring, Old Testament lyricism of Blood Meridian. And indeed there is an idyllic, rhapsodic quality to that gentler novel’s vision of the American west – a gorgeousness to the prose, and to its narrative of two young friends riding on horseback across the continent’s great, open landscapes, that was personified in the beauty of Penélope Cruz when the novel was adapted for film in 2000.
While the film of All the Pretty Horses did not do full justice to its source novel, McCarthy was generally fortunate in how his books were adapted for cinema. After filling out the Border Trilogy, with The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, McCarthy published the novel No Country for Old Menin 2005, and then, perhaps his most beloved yet also his bleakest novel, The Road, in 2006. The former was the basis for the Coen brothers’ best film and a masterpiece of modern American cinema, while the latter was adapted as a film that admirably captured the source novel’s blasted, snowy, desolate palette (The Road, for those who have not read it,depicts a hellish, post-apocalyptic America where human beings are farmed for their flesh in dank underground dungeons, while gangs of cannibal-warlords possessing slave-harems roam the land).
In the decade-and-a-half between The Roadand his final two novels – a period McCarthy spent attending lectures and feeding an interest in science and mathematics at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico – he turned his hand to screenwriting. Ridley Scott’s 2013 film The Counselor, made from a McCarthy screenplay, was critically panned and was a commercial flop despite a dazzling cast, almost overburdened with stars. Yet for all its undeniable preposterousness, that film’s total commitment to its own deranged vision – far more gaudy, flamboyant and aesthetically unhinged than anything that ever appeared between the covers of a McCarthy novel – and its authentically terrifying atmosphere of ontological dread and malevolence suggest that it’s bound to become some kind of cult classic … not least for Cameron Diaz’s dead-eyed stare as she grandiosely and inexplicably declares, in what may as well be a summation of the entire McCarthy philosophy, “The slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining”.
McCarthy had a reputation for reclusiveness, rarely giving interviews once his work had attained sufficient prominence that he could get away with only minimally publicising himself. When he did emerge, improbably, into the blinding lights of the The Oprah Winfrey Show after Winfrey had selected The Roadfor her careermaking book club, the results were memorably awkward: McCarthy visibly blushed on being asked whether the novel was in essence a love letter to his son.
How curious to think that a novel so unsparingly horrific, so concise and total a vision of cataclysm, achieved such popularity as to bring its author into the good graces of Winfrey. I first read that unforgettable book shortly after its publication. Many of its images and scenes stayed with me, as did its sombre lyricism which insisted on finding a spectral beauty in a derelict cosmos, a smashed and blackened planet, a shattered civilisation. No passage in all of McCarthy’s magnificent oeuvre haunted me more than the lines
in The Roadthat suggested how rapidly the comforts and niceties of our world would be supplanted by something more ancient, terrible and irrational in the wake of an unspecified cataclysm: “Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road.”