I was very saddened to hear about the passing of Cormac McCarthy, one of the greatest writers of fiction of all time. I, like many others, was so excited by the release of two new McCarthy novels, ‘Stella Maris’ and ‘The Passenger’, at the end of 2022. I devoured ‘Stella Maris’ in no time at all and then moved onto ‘The Passenger’ with equal relish. I deliberately slowed myself down, as is often the case when I want to savour a work of fiction. What strikes me about ‘The Passenger’ is McCarthy’s ear for dialogue. There can be few writers who have better felt and expressed the salty and skewed wisdom and philosophy of barrooms and drinking holes. The ever-talkative characters encountered by Bobby Western in the cafes, bars, and restaurants of New Orleans bring to mind for me the many friends and associates of Cornelius in McCarthy’s 1979 novel, ‘Suttree’. The title character lives in a world populated by people on what might be called the margins of mainstream society. Yet McCarthy doesn’t see them this way. He delights in giving these drunks and hustlers, convicts and criminals the time and space to expound on the subject of their world and what they think of it. McCarthy strikes me as a writer who really listens to how people speak and enjoys it.
McCarthy’s monumental and horrifying ‘Blood Meridian’ (1985) has haunted me since I first picked it up from a charity shop in the early 2010s. A bloody and lawless tale of scalp hunters marauding through Mexico in the 1840s becomes something altogether on an epic scale when the gang encounters the giant, pale, hairless, erudite, and utterly evil figure of The Judge, seated on a rock in the desert. The Judge waits for the gang just as surely as Satan lies in wait for Eve in the garden in ‘Paradise Lost’. The difference being that the gang are already fallen and The Judge will show that just how much further they have to fall. The Judge is not human in any recognisable sense. He exemplifies the extremes of human nature; he is a skilled linguist and philosopher with sufficient scientific knowledge to create gunpowder from nothing and save the gang from a sticky situation. He is also a murderer of men, women, and children and serial abuser of children. He is depravity with eloquence and education. When reading the book, we must confront The Judge just as surely as the unfortunate Kid, the book’s protagonist, must face him.
I feel that it is McCarthy’s empathy and interest in humanity, as exemplified in ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Suttree’, that enables him to create such compellingly dark and terrifying characters like The Judge and like Anton Chigurh from ‘No Country for Old Men’ (2005). Like The Judge, Anton is both sub-human and beyond human. He is described as ‘a psychopathic killer’ by one of the characters in the book who also recognises the inadequacy of that description in capturing Chigurh’s nature. He kills without a trace of remorse or compassion. He is not motivated by money, power, status or even his own survival. Ed Tom Bell, the local sheriff struggling to understand the violence not only of Chigurh but of the drug wars threatening the safety of his community, wonders if Chigurh is in fact ‘a ghost’ at one point. McCarthy does not write the kind of villains who can be overcome by officers of the law who thereby restore order and safety to their towns. He sees that man’s capacity for evil is limitless, not confined to ‘psychopathic’ aberrations like The Judge and Chigurh, but so is man’s capacity for good.
Sheriff Bell thinks the following as the violent madness of the book nears its conclusion: ‘I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.’ ‘No Country for Old Men’ may feel like a western set in the 1980s at times, but McCarthy knows the world is not made up of heroes and villains, just people – with the full spectrum of goodness and decency and depravity and evil that brings with it. There is no need for ghosts as an explanation for incomprehensible events in a world in which narcotics exist. You can’t write a character like The Judge or Chigurh or John Milton’s Satan or Shakespeare’s Iago without a profound knowledge of yourself and your fellow man. I will leave you with one of my favourite pieces of McCarthy’s prose from the end of ‘Blood Meridian’:
‘And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favourite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favourite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.’
Better things for better living, but not through chemistry 