no country for old men (cormac mccarthy)

This is an almost Manichean novel. The author includes an ersatz narrator, Sheriff Bell, whose thoughts are presented in italics. Sheriff Bell is an old-school boy, with old-school values. He doesn’t like hippies, probably dislikes Nietzsche, is wary of people with their hair died green. He’s also sheriff in a Texas border region which is suffering an epidemic of drug-related violence. Sheriff Bell is conservative, presumably Republican. He harks back to a world he and his parents grew up in, where common values of decency were instilled in society. As soon as those values, (which presumably include not dying your hair), were lost, things started to go to hell in a handcart. Sheriff Bell is set up as a sympathetic character in a world of mindless sociopaths. He loves his wife and serves his community. His values go beyond the performative - he knows that a medal is just a piece of metal, and that wealth and consumption are part of the problem.

On the other hand there is the mercurial, charismatic, and sociopathic villain, Chigurh, so brilliantly played in the film by Javier Badem. (So brilliantly that it’s hard to read the novel without thinking of Bardem’s lanky hair and awkward physique.) Chigurh is a  monster who kills without mercy or regret, and believes himself to exist on another moral plain altogether.

The complexity of the novel, and McCarthy’s approach, comes from the fact that the dramatic epicentre of the novel, that which propels the action and ensures the reader’s undivided attention, is not the worthy Sheriff Bell, but the unworthy Chigurh. His actions and cod-philosophy drive the narrative and lend the novel its gothic splendour. When he dies, the bottom drops out of the book. It’s a paradox which, for all of McCarthy’s benediction of Bell, feels unresolved. Bell’s goodness functions in response to Chigurh’s evil. They might be two sides of the same coin that the killer spins to decide people’s fates.

Perhaps there’s something about the way in which the USA functions at work here. Just as the myth of the west required the myth of the savage (touched upon in the novel and much of McCarthy’s writing), a myth that was still hyperactive in my youth, contemporary USA needs to construct it’s antithesis courtesy of a ‘savage’ enemy. Be that communism or islam or even, as is the case of Trump and co now, the immigrants, supposedly illegal, who infiltrate the purity of the nation through a porous border. Which brings us back round to Cormac McCarthy. The strength of his writing is contingent on the idea of the other, which lurks across the border, waiting to poison the homespun decency of small-town America. 

blood meridian (cormac mccarthy)

Cormac was a rite of passage for a certain class of artistically orientated male Londoner back in the nineties. Perhaps because all his novels seem to be constructed around the notion of young men enduring their rites of passage. Perhaps because the apparent harsh reality of McCarthy’s world was such a counterpoint to our urban existence. Secretly we all longed to be riding a horse across the frontier, the horse being our best friend, in order to confront the innumerable demons that growing up threw at us. Blood Meridian contains the coming of age thread, even if it is less pronounced than in later works. The kid who becomes part of Glanton’s scalping band, and obtains an existential nemesis in The Judge, is blood brother to the young men in The Crossing and All The Pretty Horses. There is something brittle about McCarthy’s neo-biblical prose, as though you could pick it up and snap it and feed it to desert fire. Is it truly as powerful as it would like to be, or is there a cod-potency, which is achieved by whacking the reader over the head with relentless descriptions of suns rising and moons waxing, mountains on the horizon, violence forever around the corner? The books cry out for a female or feminist reading to counterbalance all their raging testosterone, with women barely featuring in the gothic western. As a man, you find yourself thinking, it’s pushing all these buttons, but what would I think if I was a woman reading this? Perhaps there’s something elemental at work here, a subversive analysis of gender - or perhaps not. The strange thing about violence is that it becomes oddly repetitive and its power seems to diminish as a result; power tires of itself, and in the end the kid, one can’t help thinking, will be happy to be put out of his misery, to escape the nihilist world he has been condemned to ride through. 

typewriters, bombs and jellyfish (tom mccarthy)

In this collection essays, McCarthy dips into his bag of stuff and comes out with his thoughts on Ulysses, Acker, Toussaint, Richter, Sterne, Lynch, Kafka among others. As we know and love, McCarthy likes to promenade in the more esoteric cultural corners. He has none of the Englishman’s fear of the pretentious, which sometimes works in his favour and sometimes works against him. Perhaps the key motif which connects the essays is his fascination with Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test, which depicts a shattered typewriter, thrown from the window of a speeding Buick. This image celebrates the semiotic liberation of language, free to run wild, letters disassociated from their seemingly obligatory epistemological roots. (It’s an image which could have leapt out of Mallo’s Nocilla Dream.) McCarthy relishes the possibilities of language when it’s released from its tedious representational duties. His gods are Joyce and Mallarmé, both seers and pranksters at the same time. The longest. most sprawling of the essays is titled Nothing Will Have Taken Place Except the Place. It’s a wonderful splurge of thought, taking on Ruscha, Auden, Henry Blofeld, DeLillo, Mallarmé and Gordon’s remarkable film Zidane. When McCarthy goes full tilt at his material, allowing his mind to run riot, setting up threads which seem unlikely, implausible or irrelevant, is when it feels as though he’s at his strongest. When he postulates a more microscopic approach, it sometimes feels as though he’s in danger of drowning in a fog of whimsy or detail. His imagination needs the open road, just as much as Ruscha did. At times it feels as though McCarthy is the lone high-wire artist, steering his way between the twin towers of Anglo-Saxon culture and the European tradition. It’s no wonder that sometimes he wobbles. But when he gets it right, it doesn’t feel as though he’s tip-toeing across the wire. It feels as though he’s flying. 

satin island [tom mccarthy]

McCarthy’s Satin Island is a puzzling novel but its also a return to form. Puzzling is what McCarthy does best and its a pleasure to see him back messing around with narrative expectations and throwing signifiers around like confetti. There’s a tendency, which I share, to use the word ‘signifiers’ as something of a catch-all, to denote a writer who appears to be aware of the semiotic weight of the themes (or memes, fuck knows) they introduce into their narratives. In the case of Satin Island, the novel’s protagonist is an anthropologist whose hero is Lévi-Strauss, so the term signifier is not merely apposite, its also necessary for a book where the semiotic significance of the material outweighs the narrative significance.

It might be worth trying to explain or justify that last phrase. McCarthy really doesn’t seem to be all that interested in narrative. Things do happen to the hero, but nothing worth writing home about. He travels a bit, he has a part-time girlfriend, with whom he sleeps, and he works for a mysterious organisation. But if we look at the classical Western narrative model, so beloved by the British, where the protagonist goes on a journey, in the process revealing or discovering things about him or herself, and by extension, the process of being human… forget it. That’s not McCarthy’s bag. Perhaps it’s a matter of minor frustration, because no matter what, narrative does matter in a novel, even in a post-Robbe Grillet anti-narrative novel, but at the same time, it’s not the only thing; and it might be that the British inhabit a literary culture where narrative tends to be prioritised above another key feature of the novel, which is that it is a space of discourse. 

I’d like to put those last three words in italics, but shall resist the impetus. What they suggest is that a novel is a place where a writer assembles various thoughts, and these thoughts are perhaps the thing that makes it distinctive, above and beyond the structure. These thoughts are arranged around themes, or memes, or perhaps, even, signifiers. This is where McCarthy comes into his own. He curates signifiers and arranges them throughout the novel. The fact that this is also, effectively, the job of the novel’s protagonist offers a Borgesian twist. The novel is also the anthropological paper which the protagonist is writing. Skydivers; Turin airport; the Gerona G8 summit; the way cancer cells function; all are part of the meaning and meaninglessness of modern life and all documented as such. At times we want to think this is all building towards something, that an underpinning narrative will reveal itself, but this says as much about our inherent need for an external order to be imposed as anything else. It’s a commentary on the act of reading. The novel’s denouement, where the protagonist doesn’t actually get to where he seems to be headed, would appear to reinforce this point. 

Perhaps it’s even more puzzling that this novel was short-listed for the Booker prize. The idea of the anti-novel, as practiced by the likes of Chejfec, Toussaint and others, infiltrating the British publishing mainstream is a delirious one. McCarthy may well be the only British novelist capable of being both slyly subversive and successful at the same time. 

C [tom mccarthy]

McCarthy's first novel dazzled. It took the nouveau roman, transposed it to Brixton, adorned it with a British sensibility and kicked some much needed life into the Anglo-Saxon novel. This is his follow-up. Where Remainder appeared to use Robbe Grillet as a model, here the predominant inspiration would appear to be Pynchon. So much so that C sometimes feels like a homage, to the similarly named V, or Gravity's Rainbow. Both in it's account of an unlikely hero traipsing across wartorn Europe and its relentless present tense.

There are worse writers to whom one might choose to pay homage. But C feels as though it is so self-consciously stepping into another’s footsteps that it never quite acquires an identity of its own. Instead, this feels like a book self-consciously in search of its raison d’etre.

There are frequent passages where the research is evident (into the life of a WW1 pilot, or post-war Egypt, for example), but all the research in the world cannot make C run. Whilst apparently a fractured narrative, skipping across the first decades of the 20^th C in a series of precise chapters, its shape is clearly defined, tied as it is to the life of the book's protagonist, Serge Carrefax. Carrefax is something of an emotional vacuum, for reasons the reader understands, (his odd upbringing, his sister's suicide), but the fact that we understand doesn't help to make him interesting. Serge is a nerd whom the novel sometimes likes to suggest is on a covert mission through the semiotic warren of modern consciousness. He further he goes, the less interesting this becomes. Which might mean that his mission is a failure, or it might mean that the modern consciousness is fundamentally tedious.

As a result, C flatters to deceive, constantly hinting at hidden depths which are never plumbed. The same has probably been said of Gravity's Rainbow, only... one cannot say it with complete conviction. The Rainbow is so sprawling, so all-encompassing, that it might just contain the secret of the universe lodged within it. Which cannot be said for C. There are no hidden secrets. Serge listens to the airwaves in expectation but nothing arrives. The book has the feel of a shaggy dog story which gives itself away far too early.

Remainder suggested that McCarthy might be capable of redeeming the British novel, endowing it with what might be termed a European sensibility, welding playfulness to the prosaic glories of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. A detour via Pynchon is not such a bad way to go. But C feels like a staging post rather than a destination. It's a book which seems to be constantly searching for a reason to exist. The punchline, that it doesn't have one, does not quite convince. 

remainder (w. tom mccarthy)

The way in which a book is discovered is part of the potential joy (or disappointment) of being a reader. Books make their way towards their audience, (or prey), often through circuitous routes, both in the process of their writing and dissemination, and the reader's awareness of their existence and gradual drift towards them. After having read a book it always seems as though the connection, between book (writer) and reader was inevitable, but until the book has been opened and consumed, that inevitability has only been theoretical. The books that you will read are out there, wending their way towards you. Many of which you will have no knowing of; because they're still beyond your ken; or they have yet to be written; or even because their writers have yet to be born.

Remainder came to me thus. I was browsing through a website, written by a group of Americans, which I came across because they'd referenced Bolano. It's the same place where I found Zurn, and The Monks. There was a brief entry about McCarthy, who at first I took to be of the Cormac variety, but then learnt was actually called Tom, and was English. I'd never heard of Tom McCarthy, even though he was/ is closer to me than I realised, and was sufficiently intrigued to order the book.

This alone doesn't guarantee its reading. Over the course of the past eighteen months or so I have made attempts to read books by British writers without being able to complete them. I've managed to come up with a kind of reader's block, and it's been years since I read a British work of fiction, as the blog attests.

I started Remainder and once again couldn't get going with it. But something made me start again last week. Perhaps it was the lure of Brixton.

There may be thousands of books set in Brixton, but I've only read one other, many years ago. Remainder is now the second. It mentions many spots I know well. Although it's years since I lived there, Brixton still feels a bit like home when I've been away from London for a while. Apart from playing football there, various friends live in the vicinity. In fact, the day after starting Remainder, I found myself travelling to Brixton three days in a row. And back again. As I travelled, below ground, I read. And learnt that a journey from where I live, on the edge of Zone 1, is the perfect distance for reading one of McCarthy's chapters. I got on the tube to Brixton, reading about Brixton, to emerge in Brixton, a Brixton exactly the same as the one described in the book. But also different. Because the one described in the book is both slightly out of date, and also fictional. It's not real.

Authenticity is in a way the keynote of McCarthy's book. It's nameless narrator, having suffered an unspecified accident, and come into a remarkable sum of money, tries to re-enact moments in his life when he has felt most real, or alive. It's dizzying stuff, as layers of reality seem to collapse in on each other. There's the ghost of Baudrillard hovering around, but also that of Bishop Berkely. How can you re-create reality? But within an alienated world, why wouldn't you want to seek a moment of truth?

It wouldn't be hard at this point to shuffle off into philosophical theorising. Which in itself is testament to the book's imaginative take on Brixton, and the world in general. What has puzzled me, however, is why, after years of finding any attempt to read the work of British writers similar to crossing the Gobi with a bottle of Evian and some M&S sandwiches in the backpack, this book succeeded in flying over (or under) the desert without my even breaking sweat. By way of explanation, I'd say that McCarthy does various things. Firstly, he conceives a remarkable story, and he tells it. He doesn't embellish it, or seek to make it appeal to a variety of selected demographics. He just tells it, in prose which, for the most part, is unadorned and functional. Secondly he's not scared of ideas. He doesn't try and make the ideas human, rather he's happy to twist his humans round his ideas. And the ideas sing for their supper far better than a whole host of carefully conceived characters ever could. Thirdly, he discovers a wicked swathe of humour in all this, which perhaps inevitably arises through the juxtaposition between the lunacy of ideas and their enactment in a given world.

Remainder isn't perfect, and probably wouldn't want to be. But it's a beautiful, dazzling work of fiction, that gives you a glimpse of what words are capable of. (As well as the benefits or risks of owning a coffee house loyalty card.) It's also set in Brixton and its chapters are ideally lengthed for a tube journey between the southernmost tip of the Victoria line and anywhere just beyond the boundary of Zone 1.

Lastly, a postscript on how the book reached this reader. As noted, it did so via a satellite and cables and a server or two, and some readers in the US (I think it's the South somewhere) who alerted me to its existence. It also got to me via an obscure publishers in Paris, who published the book after it had been rejected time after time in the UK. (Something I didn't learn until I had already been gripped by it.) I've also learnt that McCarthy is something of a star in the artworld firmament, which perhaps makes the book's success, and its ability to reach me, less surprising. However, on Thursday night, after playing football with a group of guys I know only through our connection with a small piece of sandy astroturf in Brixton, I placed the book on a wooden table in the Duke of Edinburgh, suggesting to my team-mate he might like it, and he said, oh yes, Tom's a mate of mine. I used to go out with his sister. I'm in his book about Prague. Only it's not me, he just used my song.

There had been a trace of Remainder swirling around in the patterns of the Ferndale Road sand all along.