Opinion: a continued commitment to understanding human existence made McCarthy such a mesmerising author
When it was announced last year that acclaimed American writer Cormac McCarthy would be publishing his first novel since 2006's The Road, I was excited enough to tell my wife that I would be waiting outside Waterstones the night before publication, to pick up my copy at one minute past midnight. Somewhat more grounded than I, she pointed out that prominent as McCarthy is, this is no Harry Potter-style publishing event, and Waterstones would probably be opening at their usual 9am.
McCarthy’s lengthy silence was broken by not one, but two, linked novels: The Passenger, published in October 2022, and Stella Maris, in December in 2023. Given his death at the age of 89, there is every possibility that these will be his final substantial works. In the light of this, it seems timely to assess what makes McCarthy an important enough writer to make even a hardened literature lecturer get so overexcited.
McCarthy’s novels, with their acute sense of place, fall broadly into the early Appalachian period, followed by a series of novels set largely in the American southwest, this reflecting the author’s somewhat nomadic adult life. Since the late 1990s, McCarthy has lived in New Mexico, and has spent a lot of time at the independent research establishment, the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy has enjoyed immersing himself in cutting-edge theoretical science at the Institute, and this is reflected in the new novels. Stella Maris’s protagonist, Alicia Western, is a troubled maths prodigy, while both new novels include musings on physics and higher mathematics.
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From RTÉ Archives, Harry Potter fans queue for hours outside Eason's bookshop on O’Connell Street (broadcast 16 July 2005)
Although he published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965, it wasn’t until the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 that McCarthy met with commercial success. Before this, McCarthy lived an impecunious existence, getting by on a combination of literary grants and free marketing samples. During this period, his books were generally critically lauded, but sales reflected his status as a cult "writers’ writer".
During this period McCarthy pointedly refused invitations to deliver public lectures explaining his work, despite his precarious financial state. McCarthy insisted that his novels contain everything needed for their interpretation, with no further explanation necessary. This bluntness is reflected in both the style and key recurring themes of McCarthy’s work; his novels tend towards sparseness, eschewing anything – even quotation marks – that McCarthy deems superfluous. On the other hand, McCarthy is also fond of portentous rhetoric, his books containing beautiful passages that are all the more startling for their unexpectedness.
The content of McCarthy's books is equally uncompromising. In a rare 1992 interview, he famously stated that, "there’s no such thing as life without bloodshed," a sentiment amply reflected in his novels’ worldview. McCarthy presents characters as capable of extremes of cruelty and evil. In arguably his greatest work, Blood Meridian (1985), McCarthy addresses the violence of America’s history, specifically the "settling" of the West. This intensely violent novel, set in the 1840s and sometimes aping the baroque language of the nineteenth-century novel, depicts that settling for the brutal conquest it really was. Similarly, in The Road (mainly written, incidentally, while McCarthy was on a lengthy stay in Ireland) civilisation has disappeared, as exhausted figures trudge through a post-apocalyptic dustbowl, plagued by violent cannibals.
This apocalyptic vision goes back a long way in his oeuvre, but the violence in McCarthy’s novels is never sensationalist or gratuitous, instead representing his understanding of how humans have evolved. Moreover, the darkness of McCarthy’s vision is very much leavened by other elements in his conception of human nature. His characters possess a capacity for evil, but also for friendship and affectionate caring. Central to The Road, for example, and countering the bleakness, is the protagonists’ tender father-son relationship, while the violence of Blood Meridian is offset by a jet-black humour.
Both the humour and our human capacity to form caring relationships are also in evidence in The Passenger. It continues a defiance of genre expectations seen elsewhere in McCarthy’s works. No Country for Old Men (2005), for example, wears the clothes of a crime thriller, but subverts that genre’s usual climactic ending. Similarly, The Passenger begins with a mystery, when diver Bobby Western discovers a downed aeroplane with one passenger missing. From there, the plot follows Bobby’s descent into persecution from various shady authorities, but this being McCarthy, there is no neat closure.
McCarthy is as ever more interested in posing questions about human existence than providing answers. The premise instead allows McCarthy to explore a range of concerns that have resonance with earlier works, while remaining remarkably original. And there is the aforementioned humour, as Bobby drifts among his New Orleans friends, a compelling range of sardonic and variously erudite barflies.
As McCarthy’s likely final works, The Passenger and Stella Maris will inevitably have resonance and as such it is appropriate that they mark both a culmination, but also an extension, of ideas he broached earlier in his career.
McCarthy’s exploration of big themes – life, death, violence, what it means to be human – does mean that his work has been characterised, not without justification, as exceptionally masculinist. Indeed, the forthcoming Stella Maris is rare in featuring a female protagonist. This shouldn’t detract, however, from McCarthy’s commitment in his work to exploring the realities of existence honestly and unflinchingly. It is this continued commitment to understanding human existence, alongside the insatiable curiosity and originality of his work, which has made McCarthy such a mesmerising author.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
