book reviews

I will once again be participating in the Southern Oregon Book & Author Fair on Saturday, November 21 in the 2nd floor ballroom of the Ashland Springs Hotel in beautiful downtown. Ashland. I’ll be signing and selling copies of The Mystery of Things, chatting with my fellow regional authors and book lovers, and generally enjoying a day of bookish kanoodling.

Though this is (if memory serves) my fourth time round with the book fair, it will be the first time as an Ashlander, which has allowed me to participate more with behind-the-scenes preparations. Specifically, I’ve been building the book fair’s new website, which is where you should go for more info if you’re thinking of attending!

With something like sixty authors in attendance, It will be a great way to start your Christmas shopping for all those book lovers among your friends and family!

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A discussion of the book/film of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is going on over on the Yahoo discussion group, Literate Catholics Unite, and I thought it would do a bit of double duty for me to post here what I just posted there about this book/movie, both of which I regard as masterpieces.

Here’s what I wrote, and WARNING….SPOILERS AHEAD!

I have only read two McCarthy novels so far, his last two: NO COUN TRY and THE ROAD. It is because of them that I now want to read the rest of his work, all of it. Yes, the tales are viiolent and bleak, so I wouldn’t reccomend them for all tastes, but I suspect that some future lit historian is going to look back on these decades and comment on our greatest writers’ preoccupation with violence and evil…no need to wonder why, I guess.

We’re certainly in the realm of theodicy here, the problem of evil, though not, at least with McCarthy (in any overt way) with an attempt to reconcile evil with the existence of God in a theological or apologetic way. McCarthy is certainly working in a post-Christian universe, whether personally or just because that’s where our culture is, I don’t know; but what interests me, in terms of McCarthy’s Catholic roots, is his honest awareness of man’s insufficiency to deal with evil without God. Whether God’s “absence” in his characters’ lives is God’s fault or the characters’, he leaves for others to consider; he’s just dealing with the fact that, naked and alone as we seem to be, there is a type of evil so vicious that it cannot be fought without risking, not only one’s life, but one’s soul. Indeed, I think McCarthy shares the historical pessimism of Tolkien in this regard, with his concept of “the long Defeat”. One character in No Country calls it “the Dismal Tide.”

This is (I think) the leading theme of No Country, and the reason why it has to end as it does. Issues of three-act structure aside, a “Hollywood ending”, would have given us at least the sense of evil can be contained if not defeated outright by some hero’s actions. It would have used what a screenwriter friend of mine calls “the rule of Three”—setup, setup, payoff. (Once you know the principle, you’d be amazed how many times you see this in movies with repeating motifs—there’s something immensely satisfying about “getting it on the third try.”) In No Country, however, notice that the now-famous coin-toss motif is only done twice—two setups, but no “payoff”. In a “Hollywood” ending, there would have been a third coin toss, between Sheriff Bell and Chigurh, ending in the defeat of the latter by the goodness and bravery and cleverness of the former. (Instead, in the second toss, we get the beautiful dignity of Carla Jean, who simply refuses to play Chigurh’s game. It seems the only moment in the film when the monster seems just a little rattled.)

Indeed, from the opening prologue, spoken by the “good old man”, Sheriff Bell, we are asked to consider whether this evil we’re seeing now is something new, or has always been around. “I don’t know what to make of that,” he says after describing the execution of a man who’d killed a 14-yr-old girl, and didn’t repent of it, even though he knew he was about to go to hell for it, “I surely don’t.” We’re also being asked to consider how one can fight this sort of evil without losing one’s soul. (“When you look into the abyss,” as Nietzsche famously put it, “the Abyss looks into you.”) Bell affirms (as his actions show, particularly in the last motel room scene) that he is not afraid to die; that’s part of his job; but he is not willing to put his soul at hazard. In other words, he doesn’t know how to fight this thing without God, and God hasn’t come in to his life, for whatever reason.

Llewelyn Moss, by contrast, is also a basically decent man, but he’s cocky (the sin of Pride) and thinks he can take on Chigurh and the drug dealers. He’s told on more than one occasion that he’s out of his league, but he won’t listen. Notice that he’s not out of his league in terms of resourcefulness—the story, in fact, give us many parallels between Moss and Chigurh in this area. (I love the doubling in the beginning, where both “hunters” tell their “prey” to “hold still.”) But Moss must inevitably be defeated because he simply cannot match Chigurh (or even the drug dealers) in ruthlessness. In evil. He just hasn’t got it in him. In fact, one could argue that Moss’s trouble really begins because of an act of mercy: Unable to sleep because of a bad concsience, he chooses to go back to the scene of the original shootout, knowing full well that it’s (literally) “dumber ‘n hell”, to take water back to the wounded Mexican in the desert. (Hell would never be so dumb to put itself at risk on an act of mercy.)

Sheriff Bell, being wiser, certainly more humble and aware of his limitations, takes the thing as far as his capabilities and duty warrants, then retires. (At that point—the end—Chigurh is still literally walking the streets. Whether this is a good decision on Bell’s part, McCarthy, like the master he is, who never tells his readers how to think or feel, leaves to us.

In a similar vein in the film/book, there’s the conversation between Sheriff Bell and the disabled old-timer with all the cats, a former Sheriff’s Deputy wounded by a criminal who later died or was executed in prison. Bell asks him (another “old man”) what he would have done if the State had let the guy out instead. The old man says probably nothing, and proceeds to explain that when you just keep fighting this stuff, you lose pieces of yourself—he then tells a “bleeding to death” story by way of analogy.

As for Bell’s dream in the last scene, I think McCarthy is hinting at Bell’s awareness that his father had something (a small lamp to lead the way into the darkness) that he doesn’t have. His father’s lamp still gives him just enough light, however, to lead him along the path. Similarly, there’s the conversation between Sheriff Bell and the other Sheriff towards the end, after Moss is killed in the motel,where Bell comments to the effect that it all started going to hell when “Sir and Ma’am went out the window.” These “Old Men” of the title are good because of how they were brought up: by good, solid people in a simpler time; but they are not equipped—only a saint, arguably, would be—to handle the evil that’s coming at us all now.

[NOTE: the Clan has posted a couple of blogs on the movie and the Oscars over on Catholic Movies Online.]

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The Washington Post has an interview with writer Annie Dillard, who is a passionate master of the “lean and mean” writing style…which I admire often, but do not (myself) much subscribe to.

You may have to register to access the interview, but it’s free and worth it.

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