Cormac McCarthy: The Great Stylist
Matt Jones reflects on the influence and reach of the great novelist of American frontiers.
The late Martin Amis said of Elmore Leonard that ‘all his thrillers are Pardoner’s Tales, in which death roams the land’. The same is true of Cormac McCarthy, whose loss at 89 is momentous. McCarthy is a direct descendant of the great American modernists, Faulkner and Hemingway, as seen in a lack of punctuation and Faulknerian sentences which span an entire printed page or more.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of his writing, however, is the expressive power of the syntax and vocabulary, as akin to poetry as it is to prose, and which owes as much to The Book of Revelation as it does to Hills Like White Elements and As I Lay Dying. When McCarthy holds forth, he does so like John Milton crossed with Dylan Thomas channelling a Pentecostal preacher, a lava-like torrent of words, as awesomely elemental as the meteor shower in which ‘the kid’ in Blood Meridian is born.
Unlike his literary forebears, McCarthy also wrote genre fiction, specifically westerns. The great romance of the American west has been hugely compelling for generations of nature-starved city dwellers the world over, but the myths of the western have long since been debunked as white male fantasies. It is fair to say that McCarthy is characteristic of this late-Twentieth century revisionism, but even fairer that, in his hands, the genre becomes a vehicle for his philosophical and existential concerns, such as the stand-off between good and evil, but also his reflection on the transient nature of things.
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