McCarthy: Child of God

Child of God
Cormac McCarthy
(Vintage, 1993) [1973]
197 p.

They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.

So begins this harrowing tale of a loner turned killer in rural Tennessee. Lester Ballard is poor, homeless, without a family, and incapable, it seems, of living in society.

He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps.

He roams the countryside, scavenging, bedding down in abandoned out-buildings, treasuring his rifle and not much else. He might be crazy. When, one fateful day, he discovers two lovers dead in their car on a deserted road, he does something that removes all doubt, and the novel, which was already sombre and crepuscular, takes a hurtling plunge into the dark.

So dark and depraved does it become that this reader, at least, began to wonder what the point was. I expect McCarthy’s books to be violent and disturbing, but in later novels like No Country for Old Men and The Road there is always a glimmer of light around the edge, a crack through white a hint of redemption or justice might be glimpsed. That glimmer is harder to find here. What is McCarthy up to? Is a portrait of evil enough? Are we to feel compassion for this man? Hatred? Should we long for justice, for him and those whom he harms? I think it’s possible, as readers, to answer all of these questions in the affirmative, but how the book itself answers them is sometimes murky. The title, maybe, gives us a hint.

Certainly one good reason to read the book, despite its difficulties, is the rough allure of its prose. Muted, laced with idiomatic colour, severe, and sometimes starkly beautiful, his voice is one of a kind. Look again at that opening sentence above. It’s quite long, and has a meandering feel, but it functions something like a cinematic image: we see first the wide shot, with a row of vehicles coming up, and then we’re focused on the back of the truck, and then an individual man, and finally an individual face. We get a sense of motion, both back and forth, as they rock over the ruts, and also forward and in. And then there is the alliteration: caravan and carnival, teetering and tuning, guitar and grinning, fiddlepeg and face. And the touches of poetry: “swales of broomstraw”. I read that sentence, set the book in my lap, and smiled, happy to be in the hands of a master again.

To take another example, consider this passage in which Lester is lost inside a cave:

Ballard lay listening in the dark but the only sound he heard was his heart. In the morning when the light in the fissure dimly marked him out this drowsing captive looked so inculpate in the fastness of his hollow stone you might have said he was half right who thought himself so grievous a case against the gods.

Again, we have a sentence that keeps going where another author might have split it up, more tidy-like. There’s a striking visual image of Lester lying on the rock, like a figure sketched in chiaroscuro, and a blending of the narrator’s voice, I think, with Lester’s own, a hint of which comes through in the last phrase. It has a stern beauty. The book is full of things like this.

It is not full, though, of quotation marks.