Has died at the age of 89 - I never have read Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, but the Border Trilogy has been a lifelong favourite, with its terse, deliberate, yet poetic linguistic style perfectly encapsulating both the landscape and the characters of the Tex-Mex geography.
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I remember reading The Crossing in 1995 when I was on strike at the BBC. I wanted to do something with my day, having eschewed a day's wages. I'm not sure I could read a single book in a day nowadays ("must check my instagram account again..."), or if it's actually a tribute to the novel's quality that it kept me engaged for several hours. Not that I can recall a thing about it other than cowboys, dust, horses, no jokes.
I read another one a couple of years later, and it was pretty much the same thing. I could be doing a great writer a terrible disservice here. It's not that I didn't like him, just that he was one of those writers that the book reviewers made you feel like you had to read. For Tex-Mex border ambience I'd rather listen to Calexico and Lila Downes. -
The only book of his which I've read is The Road, which I thought was truly scary and filled me with a lot of dread.Comment
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I feel like I should have read more of his stuff. Like Inca, I only read The Road. Which I thought was very good, and the descriptions of his other stuff sounds like it should be up my street. So I don't know why I haven't.Comment
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Cities Of The Plain was one of the first books I read as a teenager that was a proper work of literature, not genre fiction like sci-fi or horror. Eason's bookshop on Nassau Street had gotten an order of mine wrong so they very kindly sent me a free copy of what was then McCarthy's latest plus one other book lost to posterity. At the time I remember being quite bored by Cities Of The Plain (It perhaps didn't help that it was the concluding part of a trilogy I knew nothing about) but could see there was obviously serious talent at work. It was only when I read The Road much later that I began to get an idea of how good he was. A few months ago I read Blood Meridian for the first time. It's an astonishing book. Not meant for those like me with blighted attention spans; you've to devote serious time to it. But once you sit down and break through that initial 30 minute barrier where your mind strays every few seconds for the reasons imp described the story becomes this hypnotic, hallucinatory epic that is essentially an exploration of one of my favourite themes - a journey through an incarnation of Hell, this time rendered as the US-Mexican border of the mid-Nineteenth Century. From what I can tell, the apocalyptic and hellish framings of Blood Meridian and The Road were where McCarthy's style truly found a home. His austere, biblical, intensely rhythmic prose was ideal for exploring the way the broken characters of these stories interact, ideal for describing a ruined world.
I thought this was a lovely assessment:
https://twitter.com/Mr_Considerate/status/1668711501736169473?s=20
https://twitter.com/Mr_Considerate/status/1668737067595997191?s=20
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