Cormac McCarthy is a writer almost without peer. Like Tim Winton, he makes the commonplace anything but common. His powers of description are renowned, yet his writing is spare. His characters are compellingly drawn and deeply human.
In essence, McCarthy writes to explore the human condition, and it is on this exploration that all his works turn. From Blood Meridian, through to the Border Trilogy, including his most recognised novel, All The Pretty Horses, McCarthy's works are close to being unremittingly bleak. And in spite of this, they ring true. They remind us of the dark recesses of the human mind, and of that darkness played out in human life. McCarthy writes of a world that is real for very many people, of a badlands existence where life is palpable but the human grasp on it is tenuous.
His most recent book, No Country For Old Men, covers already ploughed territory for McCarthy, but in a different context. Whereas previously his novels have been predominantly set in the past, No Country For Old Men unfolds across the present: a present of lawlessness, drugs and mayhem. Its protagonists represent elements of the human response to evil.
Llewelyn Moss stumbles into circumstances that change his life, the bounty of a drug deal gone wrong in the desert. He begins a dance with the devil, certain that his steps will be sure enough. Sheriff Bell is a man of duty, a man nearing the end of a respected career in law enforcement, a man perhaps for whom the book is titled. His patch, his county has not known violence like that visited on it by drug runners and double dealings from across the border. "I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there aint nothing short of the second comin' of Christ that can slow this train. I don't know what is the use of me laying awake over it. But I do". Sheriff Bell carries out his duties instructed by Christian conviction, but under the struggle of circumstances pointing at a world steeped in sin and depravity and evil; a world that renders his work beyond him. A world populated by people like Anton Chigurh. Chigurh is a wraith in human form, a reaper, an incarnation of evil under the eternal lie of remaining true to himself. In these three men, Moss, Bell and Chigurh, we meet some of the human responses to life.
The book's back cover asks the question "how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?" and to it could be added "how travels a man as his path unravels?" I have read and re-read everything that Cormac McCarthy has written. He is a masterful writer who underplays his hand and treats his reader with respect. The simplicity and elegance of his writing often belies its depth and visceral strength. Reading McCarthy is time well spent. His writing, his exploration of the depth and darkness of humanity, with its glimpses of redemption and dignity will remain with the diligent reader long after the last page shuts.
