Outer Dark

Didn't love it, didn't hate it.

I loved The Road. I enjoyed No Country for Old Men. I thought I loved Cormac McCarthy.

Then I read Blood Meridian. HATED it. I found it boring. I tried another (I forget which one now-Child of God, maybe?), and gave up after a few chapters. This book was neutral. I don't regret reading it, but I'd never recommend it to anyone. It felt like a story that didn't have a purpose.

Maybe I don't care for McCarthy after all.

It's impossible to argue with McCarthy's prose, and the thudding dread of this is exquisite. It doesn't quite reach the heights of some of his other work for me, but still fantastic work here.

I think I'd give this a 3.5/5 if we were being very specific. It is perhaps the most gruesome of the McCarthy novels I've read, including The Road. The gruesomeness is not the same, with the exception of one particularly disturbing scene. But, the level of it is more similar to that in Blood Meridian.

Similar to Blood Meridian, there is an ongoing dread all the time. The co-protagonists wander the countryside. One, looking for her newborn child, encounters varying levels of kindness or at least apathy with a few exceptions. The other, seemingly wandering aimlessly*, encounters varying levels of violence, or at least apathy, with a few exceptions. The second character, Culla, claims at a few points to be searching for his sister, though I observe no evidence of this.

Culla and Rinthy, the co-protagonists, begin the novel in a cabin somewhere in Appalachia (Johnson County, I believe it is written). A tinker appears—I'd not heard or seen this word before and had to look it up: “a usually itinerant mender of household utensils” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. MW also notes that, in Ireland mainly, it is an occasionally offensive reference to Romani. That probably tracks for the setting of this novel. As the novel tracks the co-protagonists, we occasionally interact with three suited men, usually through remnants of their evils.

The leader of these three strikes me as being somewhat similar to Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. Not the same, but a similar incarnation of some sort of evil. Much of McCarthy's work deals with lowercase-e evil, but I think to simplify them as biblical would be a mistake. Clearly, McCarthy works with some biblical allegories, but I think the good and evil stand apart from any religiosity and deal mainly in the realities of human life. There are some evil, depraved things in McCarthy's writing. Yet, none of them is truly otherworldly, at least in my reading. Though, I've yet to read Orchard Keeper or Child of God, and perhaps those would force me to reconsider.

As usual, I love the writing. Particularly the dialogue. I am from Southern Illinois, which is not part of Appalachia. There is a lot of commonality, though, in the language/dialect. Sooo much of the dialogue I could hear in my grandpa or great-grandparents' voices, or in the voices of the old-timers that crowded my grandma's restaurant when I was young (and still when I visit, though my grandma no longer owns the place). This touch of familiarity means that the dialogue always rings true, and always rings warmly to my ear, even when the words are menacing. Perhaps then even moreso.

McCarthy is the best I've encountered at writing that dialect into words. “It's got pitchers”, “Lord god he's kilt hisself”, and poetically: “Mm-hmm. Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.” It all rings so true. The dialect is not a sign of intelligence. So many authors write characters that speak this way as a shorthand for stupidity or ineptitude. This is not so. I appreciate McCarthy for this writing.

Another thing I admire about McCarthy's writing is his attitude towards tradesmen and the depiction of work. He clearly liked knowing the steps of a process, and sometimes in my reading I feel as though his writing wouldn't be the worst reference you could consult if you hadn't an official source. His writing reminds me a little of Michael Mann's filmmaking (see: Thief). Take a look at these two paragraphs:

“Yep, the man said. He ran his forefinger around a tallow tin and brought forth the last of it like cake icing and daubed it over the tapered spline of the axle. Holme watched while he eased the wheel into place and while he fitted the nut and turned it hand tight. He gave the wheel a spin and it went smoothly, dishing slightly and whispering as if it rode through water. Where's that wrench now? he said. He was feeling along the ground and Holme thought for a minute the man was blind.
It's under your foot, he said.
The man stopped and looked up at him, then took up the wrench. Ah, he said, here tis. He tightened the nut and then took the cotterpin from the greasecup where he had put it for safekeeping and bent the ends with his thumb and fitted it and reflared it again. Then he tapped the cup into place with the heel of his hand and rose.”

How great is that? Makes you feel like a real teamster back in 190whenever.

All that praise and consideration aside, this did not feel at the same level as that of Blood Meridian, The Road, or the Border Trilogy. It felt like a bit like a canticle, if that makes sense. A series of interactions, but the resolution, if it can be called that, felt incomplete and without form. I almost felt that the last chapter could be removed. But I think I will restrain that judgement until I sit with this a while longer, and perhaps read it over again, because I also feel that the last sentence may be a key theme: “Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.” I wonder who McCarthy thinks that blind man is (all of us?) and I wonder who he thinks should do the telling.

“A dead man's dog ain't got a name.”

Yikes.

I don't even know what to say, it did remind me of The Road, and is not a happy time. I did read this because someone had it on a psychological horror list and hmm. I'd say grimdark for sure.