"The Coen brothers may have chosen wisely, however, in choosing 'No Country for Old Men' to film. It's filmable. I don't know if audiences could endure 'Blood Meridian' if it were filmed faithfully. As for 'Suttree,' imagine 'Huckleberry Finn' crossed with 'Under the Volcano.'" -- Roger Ebert
Cormac McCarthy is the new Jane Austen. His "No Country for Old Men," which read to me like a Coen brothers' piece just waiting to be shot, has indeed been made into a film by Joel and Ethan Coen, and it blew away the critics at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. The twisting tones -- dark humor, elegiac wistfulness, manic violence -- suggest an ideal match of literary and cinematic sensibilities.
"Blood Meridian" is set to be directed by Ridley Scott. I share Roger's apprehension about what a "faithful" adaptation would be like, but Scott -- the man who prettified the West so cloyingly in "Thelma and Louise" -- seems like the wrong man for the job, whether the goal is to make an authentic movie version or even a glossy, ersatz one. (I think Scott shot his wad after "The Duellists," "Alien" and "Blade Runner," and should have returned to his strong suit, directing perfume commercials.)
And Variety has reported that McCarthy's most recent novel, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winner "The Road," is to be adapted by Joe Penhall ("Enduring Love") and directed by John Hillcoat ("The Proposition," which some critics compared to McCarthy).
The eminent literary critic Harold Bloom admits he couldn't get through"Blood Meridian" on his first two tries because "the sheer carnage of it, though it is intensely stylized, is nevertheless overwhelming." I have had a similar experience with the book, which (especially next to "The Road") struck me as overwritten and laboriously "poetic." I confess that, in my two attempts so far, I haven't (or "havent") been able to ford past the first hundred-and-something pages of "Blood Meridian," because I've found the logorrheic style and the relentless agony and grotesquerie described on every page numbing. (That and the fact that the book seems to be composed almost exclusively of nouns and adjectives. It's about a journey, but feels utterly static -- which may indeed be The Point.) Having succeeded in getting through it on his third try (and successive ones), Bloom now regards it as one of the best American novels. I rode on and rode on, but I never arrived there.
But I want to talk about "The Road" -- which I read first, and which is written in a spare, cryptic style that's roughly 180 degrees from the florid "Blood Meridian." (Of course, the very fact that I read "The Road" first may contribute to this impression.) Like most great works of art, it's ambiguous, and can be read in any number of ways, all of which may make partial sense. Its setting is clearly "post-apocalyptic," but I've seen reviews and articles that say it takes place after a nuclear holocaust, in "nuclear winter," yet that is by no means clear-cut. If McCarthy had wanted to spell it out, he could have done it in just a few words. But he didn't. He keeps the story locked in on the (nameless) man and the boy, with rare and telling exceptions.
[Obviously, you should read no further until you've read "The Road" -- which I urge you to do at once.]
"The Road" is a story and a metaphor -- about the course of a life, and especially about storytelling. There are indications that nuclear weapons have been detonated (a flash in the sky, clocks stopping at 1:17, fires devouring the land, animal and vegetable life nearly extinguished). But there doesn't seem to be any radioactive fallout. Most bacteria seem to have died (corpses and apples on the ground don't rot, they just dry out), but gut bacteria still help digest food, and the man is careful to avoid cans of food that are swollen or otherwise tainted. If it were merely (merely?) a worldwide nuclear disaster, and the temperature and atmosphere could still support human life, plants would still grow and seeds would germinate, even under dust-gray skies. So what is it? The aftermath of a meteor, like the one that extinguished the dinosaurs and so much other life on earth? Or is the earth itself somehow dying from the inside, extinguished at the core?
But that's all beside the point. I bring it up just to illustrate the book's haunting ambiguity. There's a paragraph on page 74 that nearly made me jump out of my chair, because it shifts (for the first and only time in the book) from the third-person to the first-person. This follows an episode in which the boy thinks he sees another little boy and the man loses track of him for just a brief time. Both of them see a dog. Then comes this:
The dog that he remembers followed us for two days. I tried to coax it to come but it would not. I made a noose of wire to catch it. There were three cartridges in the pistol. None to spare. She walked away down the road. The boy looked after her and then he looked at me and then he looked at the dog and began to cry and to beg for the dog's life and I promised I would not hurt the dog. A trellis of a dog with the hide stretched over it. The next day it was gone. This is the dog he remembers. He doesnt remember any little boys.This paragraph is almost like that moment in Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman," when a tiny gesture out of the ordinary hits you like an earthquake. (Side note: People routinely say that McCarthy does not use apostrophes or other punctuation. Wrong. He uses apostrophes and commas sparingly ("dog's" but not "doesnt"), and uses periods and question marks like everybody else. Not many colons, though, and no semi-colons.)
So, the paragraph above makes you ask: Who the hell wrote that? Which, in turn, makes you wonder who wrote the story you're reading. Is it an omniscient third-person narrator? Or is the man writing the book in the third person, the way he says he tells stories to the boy? Is this, perhaps, an editorial afterthought, a note scribbled in the margin by the man (or someone else) at some point? (The man says he avoids telling the boy about the old world, because to invoke it was also to invoke its loss. Besides, "How does the never to be differ from the never was?" He even tells the boy to be glad of nightmares, because they meant he was still struggling to survive: "He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death." This book is the anti-"Life Is Beautiful.")
Another key paragraph -- significantly, one about storytelling -- occurs in darkness when they seem to have reached the end of the road, the lifeless ocean. In the blackness, the only the part of the road in front of the man is visible. This, from p. 220, may be the very heart of the book:
He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and without description. Something imponderably shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack ? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.I've never read a more chilling and mysterious paragraph. It seems to conjure the very origins of myth and storytelling. Can it be that a "living man" once carved those petroglyphs? And is the story we're reading the last myth of the past? Or the first myth of the future? Set down by a nameless figure in an age of darkness between one world and another?
What to make, then, of the fact that the story continues after the death of the man? Who's ambiguously "happy" ending is this? The man's? The boy's? The hand of some other editor? The boy appears to find a surrogate father (after three days -- no explicit Christian allegory, please), and is taken into the bosom of a complete family (father, mother, sister, brother) at last. Or is that just an deathly illusion, the unreliable vision of an expiring consciousness? And what about that stunning final paragraph?
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.Near his birthplace, the man was visited by a memory like this (on p. 25): "He stood on a stone bridge where the waters slurried into a pool and turned slowly in gray foam. Where once he'd watched trout swaying in the current, tracking their perfect shadows on the stones beneath."
I loved this book so deeply I feel like I want to write a book about it. Every page, not just these three key passages. Somehow that final paragraph seems comforting to me -- if not exactly optimistic. (I originally read as that "Once there were" as referring to a time far in the future, long after the narrative.) Life on earth has been wiped out, things made wrong that could not be made right again. And yet, in the maps and mazes on the backs of trout, who lived where "all things were older than man," was an indelible (living) record of the world in its becoming. And the world, with or without man, is always in its becoming.
(That last thought reminds me of another book I want to read: "The World Without Us," a work of speculative nonfiction -- how's that for a genre? -- about what might happen if humans were suddenly wiped off the planet and everything else went about its business.)
Got some thoughts on "The Road" -- or Cormac McCarthy in general? Please comment.
I just received this book in the mail. I will not read your blog. It's the next thing after Harry Potter and I won't let you or Oprah or anyone ruin it for me.
Jim, I only read part of this post (you told me to stop reading if I hadn't read "The Road", and I haven't yet). I had bought "The Road" because I'd heard so much about it and thought it sounded kinda cool. When I asked my mom if she had ever read any of his stuff she said "no" (or, no) but she had 2 of his books if I wanted them, they were "All the Pretty Horses" and "Blood Meridian". I had heard Stephen King say that if you were only going to read one McCarthy book, make it "Blood Meridian", so I started with that one. I was bored by the unnecessary prose that didn't (or didnt) seem to go anywhere. Maybe I'll try to read "The Road" if it's 180 degrees different from "Blood Meridian", after starting "Blood Meridian" and not being that big of a fan, McCarthy didn't exactly make me want to go out and read the rest of his stuff, so I went and read some worthwile stuff like an Elmore Leonard book called "Glitz" (his best I think) and I reread "David Copperfield", Dickens unnecessary prose actually seems to go somewhere.
I haven't read "The Road" yet, its sitting on my bookshelf waiting in line, but I have read "Outer Dark", and was inspired to read Cormac McCarthy from the begining after Roger Ebert's review of "The Proposition." I really enjoyed the lonelyness of "Outer Dark," but, like you, could not plum through "Blood Meridian." I tried, I really did, but I got about as far into it as I did "Gravity's Rainbow" (Pynchon). McCarthy is a damned inpenetrable author, but I look forward to being able to penetrate him some day (not as bad as that sounds I hope!). And I will be reading "The Road" soon in hopes that I can then delve into his earlier works. Keep on plugging!
Hey Jim,
It's funny that you mention Ridley Scott. The man has been on a tear of directing since the success of Gladiator, a movie that's good, but not great. It's one of those movies that suffers the backlash of the Oscar prestige, but is "artful" enough to avoid Titanic status. Most serious critics dismiss it, though; which is unfortunate since I think it is a solid movie, if only for its pure mechanical execution. The first 45 minutes of the movie is brilliant, with the opening battle and the expository scenes thereafter. It's all very sensuous in terms of the depiction of battle, the fetishizing of warfare, and the equally interesting conversations among brethren in the celebration after the battle. From there is settles into a more generic formula and visual style, but it's a good film nonetheless.
Also, I wanted to ask, have you seen the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven? If you have or have not seen the theatrical cut, I would recommend seeing the elongated version of the film. I think Scott returns to Alien/Blade Runner form in the sense that he melds his newer aesthetic with his previous, more patient one. It's a movie of surprising subtlety. You should check it out. It's not at all a rehash of Gladiator.
I know I may be scorned for this, but I actually think there is more to Legend than is often attributed by many critics. It's almost as if Scott wanted to tell the most generic story possible, in so doing maximizing the sensual intake of sights and sounds. It's a very intriguing experiment, one that melds sight and sound together to nice effect.
As for his late 80's and 90's work, I'm with you completely. He lost something, undoubtedly. But I think his post-Gladiator work is at the very least intriguing.
I think it's great that you're posting on McCarthy, my favorite contemporary author and probably one of my favorite authors of any period. The more that read him, the better.
And I must encourage you to try reading Blood Meridian again. Maybe it helped that I read the novel in the context of my studies as an English lit major in college, tearing through McCarthy's text at or around the same time I was encountering Ulysses, Moby Dick, the Aeneid, and Paradise Lost--weighty tomes all. For a book published only 22 years ago, it stood easily within that company, in a way that the best works by Roth or Delillo (both of whom I adore) could not. For me, Blood Meridian is the American epic of the 20th century, a chronicle of the nation's past, present, and, sadly, future in a way few novels could hope to be. It's an ambitious and dense book, but, as you experienced with The Road (my favorite McCarthy novel since Blood Meridian), every page gives me distinct pleasure--it's one of the dozen or so books that I will just pick up, flip to a random page and read for a while, so great is McCarthy's command of our language.
I don't quite have that same relationship with The Road, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Truth be told, I spent a year-and-a-half reading, re-reading, and writing about Blood Meridian for my thesis in college. Obviously the novel has left an indelible mark on my life--I'm glad The Road has had a similar effect on you! You might want to check out Child of God, one of his earlier works and a great horror novel, even if it does show its debt to Flannery O'Connor too clearly.
Jim,
I had trouble with "Blood Meridian" at first, tripping over some of the lumpier words. But then I caught a wavelength and rode until the end without an interruption. I was caught up in the hallucinatory style. A journey that goes nowhere, really, from war to war, horror to horror, manmade or not. I loved it; can't wait to read it again.
But I also loved "The Road," which, like you, I read before "Blood Meridian." I don't think it's the work of an omniscient narrator -- it's too focused on the plight of the boy and his father. This is, I believe, what accounts for the prose being whittled to its bare essentials. It's really a book about reading, teaching and understanding. How does the father read his surroundings? What can he learn from various signs that civilization left behind? Is there food? Is there danger? How do I know these things so I can pass the knowledge on? The father, I think, understands that for a new world to grow, there must be stories, myths, and he hopes his son can tell the stories to the next generation, to make them understand that the world was once a place where life and light thrived, and it can be again. After all, it's written right here in the traces of civilizations past, like it was on the backs for trout.
Also, for the record, Ridley Scott needs to stay away from "Blood Meridian." It can't be filmed.
I do think, however, that "Moby-Dick," one of its forebears and possible influences, needs to be made, and by Werner Herzog.
I've read such near unanimous praise for "The Road" that I'm almost afraid to pick it up. The reviews herald it as one of, if not the great work of the dawn of our century. It wins almost every major award. Will I be disappointed if I go in with such high expectations? Has it been ruined for me even before I start it? (Currently reading "Jesus's Son," "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," and "Deathly Hallows")
Nice post, though we seem to have had opposite reactions to "Blood Meridian"--I found it breathless from start to finish--but no matter. I enjoyed "No Country," and described it to people as "Blood Simple" meets "Fargo" even before the Coen adaptation was announced, and was thrilled to read about the reaction it got at Cannes. I would much rather see "Blood Meridian" done as a four- or six-hour HBO series, for I fear a Ridley Scott-helmed adaptation will almost certainly star Russell Crowe (as either The Judge or The Kid, I'm guessing).
Incidentally, I have Roger Ebert to thank for turning me on to Cormac McCarthy via his review of "The Proposition" last year.
I share your reaction to the paragraph about the dog at several places in the book. McCarthy writes most of the book as if making a purely factual historical account of events in Hell, applying his own perspective as seldom as possible. When, from time to time, he does break this tone, the effect is beyond haunting. One passage in particular stuck with me:
On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?
I don't have the book in front of me, but I think this was the first (& only?) time when the narrator speaks in first person. The sudden posing of a philosophical query to the reader in an aside during such a matter-of-fact recitation of events...well, it would be an understatement to say I wasn't prepared for it.
One of my favorite aspects of the story itself was an interesting dynamic of the relationship between the man and the boy. The only reason the man continues to live is to keep the boy alive, yet the boy has little interest in his own survival. Throughout the book, the boy seems driven by a need to help everyone he comes across, but the man discourages him because they can barely support themselves.
The boy, like his father, needs a dependent to give purpose to his survival. The man keeps the boy alive while denying him a reason to live. The only thing that matters is the boy's life; all else is secondary.
The week I read The Road seemed to follow the theme of apocalypse. Not only did I see 28 Weeks Later and rewatch Children Of Men, I even caught the tail half of a History Channel special on the top 10 threats to mankind's existence.
The Road seemed to follow the circumstances of a supervolcano most closely. An explosion about 40 miles across would account for the flash of light. The cloud of ash would account for the drop in temperatures, the dying plant and animal life, the ashen snow that occasionally falls, and the seas turning grey. Not sure how to account for the lack of bacteria beyond that of theme (which, of course, is the real cause of Man's extinction).
I'm kind of glad to know that I wasn't the only one to leave Blood Meridian unfinished. It's the type of book (others include One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and The Master & Margarita) where I love every single page but know that a moment's distraction will render me incapable of continuing it. I have no explanation.
I have grave doubts about a Scott-directed adaptation of Blood Meridian and little desire to see The Road on the big screen. Hillcoat seems as good of choice as any though, if it must be done (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo also has the right eye for it: it's a zombie movie at heart).
"The Road" is a strange book, but overall I think it's sort of the flip-side of "Blood Meridian". Sort of. What I mean (I think) is that "Blood Meridian" also has quite a lot of imagery and language dealing with time and eternity, but in that book McCarthy seems to indicate that mankind is eternally doomed murder itself. When I finished "Blood Meridian" (on my second try) I felt like the story was set in the West almost incidentally, that it could have been set two hundred years earlier, or two hundred year from now.
"The Road", on the other hand, does offer hope, and in the passage about the trout that you cited it seems to me that he's almost saying, in a more complex way, "this too shall pass". That's a simplification, of course, but I think you see what I'm getting at.
Pairing these two books reminds me of what Kubrick supposedly said in relation to two of his films (this is a paraphrase): "'2001' is what mankind aspires to be. 'A Clockwork Orange' is what mankind is."
A few more quick things: McCarthy uses the violent death of infants quite a lot. I have to assume it's the worst thing he can think of, and therefore best illustrates humanity at its nadir.
I second the recommendation of "Child of God", which I read earlier this year. It is a NASTY book, but in a good way.
Finally, it's my understanding that McCarthy is politically more conservative than most writers (I believe I read that in the "Vanity Fair" profile from a few years back). I lean that way myself, but I gather the rest of you don't. Any thoughts on that?
Glad to see I'm not the only one that couldn't get through Blood Meridian. I tried to read it for a class but I too found it unbearably static. Knowing that Ridley Scott is going to film it gives me some incentive to give it another go but I'm not exactly relishing the experience.
My wife read The Road in an afternoon and was, no surprise, enthralled. It sits waiting on my desk. I will read it!
I've tried to read Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, but McCarthy's prose style in both struck me as hopelessly pretentious - difficult to read without being rewarding. It sufficiently turned me off McCarthy enough that I haven't picked up The Road, despite all the praise.
That being said, I'm interested in seeing No Country for Old Men b/c I am a Coen Bros. fan.
Jim, glad to see you are a McCarthy fan, as he is one of my favorite authors. I liked Blood Meridian, but if you haven't liked it after two tries, I can't imagine (even given Bloom's example) that you ever will. I completely agree with your assessment of Ridley Scott, and he is possibly the worst choice to make the movie. I hope he proves me wrong. Like Ebert pointed out, The Proposition is the closest I've seen in a movie to Blood Meridian, and it made me believe the book could be made into a movie. I just wish it were John Hillcoat doing it.
Since you liked The Road so much but didn't like Blood Meridian, I would strongly recommend the Border Trilogy. Those three books aren't nearly as nihilistic or overwrought as Blood Meridian. (Though the epilogue of the third book is a dud.) And one of your favorite movies, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, owes quite a lot to the trilogy, in my opinion.
Ridley Scott directing Blood Meridian? That worries me a bit. Tommy Lee Jones or Clint Eastwood, to name two, would do a much better job I think . As a side note, even though he's a bit of a non-actor WWE's Kane would be perfect as the Judge physically (although I think the part requires finer acting than he could deliver).
I so loved The Road...deep comment, I know!
It was painful to read...my son is the same age as I imagine the boy to be...it was so easy to imagine us in that situation. The boy's innocence despite the horror is so striking.
I read it over a month ago, yet I can't get it out of my mind! He is the master of spareness, more is said in what he doesn't say.
Beautiful!
No book or paragraph has terrified me as much as the paragraph where the father and son stumble upon the house and its quite full basement.
I read Blood Meridian last year (it was tough, but there is a turning point at around the halfway point that makes the senselessness of the violence more "sensible") and it haunted me for months.
This summer I have read 7 of his other novels and each of them seems 180 degrees from the others. His three masterpieces (Blood, Road, and Horses) are so different from each other and yet so clearly McCarthy, all of them, that I am convinced that no one has a better command of the English language. Roth, Delillo, and Updike are great writers, but none seem to have the range of McCarthy, who can still maintain a particular voice.
As for the filming of Blood Meridian--it's not possible. Just thinking about it reminds me of Trouffaut's comments on war films. It will either be unfaithful or unwatchable, and almost assuredly glorifying of violence. And no picture can replicate the words of McCarthy, despite the adage of the value of a picture.
As for the Road, I think it could be made into a movie, but it strikes me as perfect for the animated medium--a la Richard Linklater's Waking Life.
Before reading No Country, I had thought that the most filmable of all of his books was Outer Dark, but only if done by the Coen Brothers. It has fantastic dialogue, reminiscent of Fargo, juxtaposed by harrowing scenes told in stunningly artistic prose.
I am currently reading No Country For Old Men. It's a very good and very enjoyable book. Now, your enthusiasm convinced me to read The Road!
Out on a limb - couldn't Gus Van Sant's Gerry be a kind of proto-adaptation of The Road?
Andrew: That's brilliant! And the more I think about it, the more I appreciate it...
What a great blog!
I just finished The Road after not getting around to it for some time. I gave it to my husband for Christmas 2006. He reads mostly non-fiction (and just got "The World Without Us" from the library as a matter of fact) and when it comes to fiction thinks if it isn't Tolstoy or Joyce, it's not worth reading. He loved The Road. So when I heard it was being made into a movie, I thought I'd better hurry up and read it.
I don't understand why people are afraid to read this book! (my postponement was for other reasons.) Just read it and see what you think.
In any case, I really appreciate your review and the thoughtful comments sent in. I came across this blog because I decided to keep a list of words I didn't know from the book. I know some people find arcane vocabulary annoying. If it isn't part of an gratuitous showing off, I love it. McCarthy picks precise words to create a special world. At least I found that to be the case in The Road. So in Googling some of these words, I came across so many blogs about McCarthy and in particular The Road, many of them negative. I was really surprised to see so much negativity about such a gem of a novel. So I was quite grateful to stumble upon your site.
So, other than that, no great insights. I always loved the old pop fiction post-apocalyptic novels like The Stand, Swan's Song, and Lucifer's Hammer (which would have made a better movie than Deep Impact, or the other similar movie that came out at the same time--well, Deep Impact was actually pretty good, the other not so good), and a couple years ago I was thinking it was about time for another post-apocalyptic story, what with 9/11, the flu pandemic, the general "fear" zeitgeist and all. And I'm glad it was this one.
And hey, Gerry fans! My husband and I love to hike and we always call each other Gerry while we're on the trails.
(And Jim, a little off the subject--about "There Will be Blood". Yes, a lot of great stuff in it, but didn't it need a Rosebud or Elizabeth Taylor or something? Not good when you're trying to see your watch in a dark theater. Talk about something being over-rated! )