A literary colossus who embraced

Saibal Chatterjee, Award-winning Indian film critic

Dizzying variety was the spice of Cormac McCarthy’s writing style. The American novelist who died in Santa Fe, New Mexico on June 13 at the age of 89, spent a lifetime experimenting with language and literary technique. His novels varied widely in tone and substance. Every single book that he produced was a significant departure from the previous one. A truly gifted creator, he was no slave to convenient labels that could sum up what kind of a writer he really was. If there was one thing that ran through McCarthy’s work like a thread was his refusal to be romantic about humanity. He explored a nihilistic world peopled by misfits, outliers and killers, characters that he brought to life in a stark, powerful manner. His prose, when at its most flamboyant and scalding, was marked by raw energy and unsettling, graphic candour. That, however, wasn’t all there was to the twelve novels that McCarthy wrote.   

His books are focused squarely on the darker facets of life, on the frontiers of the human condition where death, devastation and doom are omnipresent. His novels disturb, offend and provoke. They aren’t the sort of books that you can curl up in bed with. They are primed to render you sleepless.

READ MORE

Cormac McCarthy lauded author of The Road and No Country for Old Men dies at 89

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson share their secrets to being fun grandparents

Sonny Mehta visionary head of Alfred A Knopf dies at 77

“There is no such thing as a life without bloodshed,” the media-shy McCarthy had told the New York Time Magazine in a rare interview thirty years ago. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is really a dangerous idea.”

Despite the successes that he registered, McCarthy made it a point to live away from the mainstream, never participated in public readings, rarely granted interviews and refrained from accepting invitations to lectures on his books and creative process. His death not only brings the curtain down on one of the most remarkable contemporary writers the US produced but also keeps some of the mystery surrounding him alive. From the minimalistic and finely chiselled to the richly detailed and delirious, from the austere to the ornate, from the philosophical and profound to the unapologetically prosaic, and from the staggeringly precise to the defiantly meandering, McCarthy’s novels straddled a phenomenally wide spectrum.

It was probably the range and nature of McCarthy’s stories that were to blame for the long time that the author took to produce a bestseller. His early novels – The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973) and Suttree (1979) – did not get him much popularity although he had begun to develop a small band of committed admirers. His vision was disturbing and, therefore, a tad difficult to grasp.

  Directors Ethan Coen (left) and Joel Coen with their Oscars for their work on ‘No Country for Old Men.’ AP

McCarthy’s fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), an anti-western, sprawling historical tale, is regarded by some as his best work, but it still did not bring his publisher, Random House, the numbers that they were looking for.   

It was seven years later that McCarthy delivered his first bestseller. All the Pretty Horses (1992), published by Alfred A. Knopf, sold over 200,000 copies in six months and won a National Book Award. The novel, about a teenage boy uprooted from the ranch he grew up on, was the first of his Border Trilogy that includes The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998).

All the Pretty Horses was adapted for the screen by actor-director Billy Bob Thornton with Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz in the cast. The film did not perform too well at the box office and was panned by critics but it paved the way for several other screen adaptations of McCarthy’s novels, including one from the early 1970s, Child of God.

Child of God, which is about a serial killer in 1960s Appalachian Tennessee, wasn’t a runaway success as a novel. Forty years later, actor-filmmaker James Franco, turned the story into a film that premiered at the Venice Film Festival but failed to impress critics.

Five years earlier, Joel and Ethan Coen’s film adaptation of No Country for Old Men, a McCarthy novel published in 2005, met with great critical and commercial success. The film won four Academy Awards, including for best picture and director. Spanish actor Javier Bardem, who was already an international star, cemented his global standing with his performance in the film as a sociopathic assassin, one of the most vicious villains ever in cinema history. McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road, yielded a film of the same name starring Viggo Mortensen. The post-apocalyptic survival drama involving a father and son’s struggles to survive in a world without plants, animals and other living organisms garnered critical applause and earned award nominations but did not end up where No Country for Old Men did.

His last two novels (The Passenger and Stella Maris), published a month apart from each other, came 16 years later even as McCarthy was being talked about as a likely contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was often rightfully ranked alongside Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon (who is probably more reclusive than McCarthy ever was) as America’s best contemporary novelists.  McCarthy was a literary colossus destined to survive the erasure that death delivers to the less accomplished.