Has anybody here read this one? I just finished it and boy-howdy what a good book. I’ve mentioned this before but every couple of years I’ll read a Cormack McCarthy book just so as to leave my comfort zone for a while. The last one I read was Child Of God and that one took me way - way out my comfort zone. This one, not as much.
Anyway there’s a lot going on in this book. And as art tends to do, it will mean different things to different readers. One thing that struck me was how well McCarthy writes animals. In the opening scene the main character, Billy Parham, then a young boy awakens to hear wolves. He dresses and goes out and crouches in a dry creek bed to watch them. The writing is amazing. I couldn’t have gotten a better picture of a pack of wolves in a snowy meadow if I’d watched a National Geographic special. Here’s a small part of it:
(Boyd is Billy’s little brother)There were seven of them and they passed within twenty feet of where he lay. He could see their almond eyes in the moonlight. He could hear their breath. He could feel the presence of their knowing that was electric in the air. They bunched and nuzzled and licked one another. Then they stopped. They stood with their ears cocked. Some with a forefoot raised to their chest. They were looking at him. He did not breathe. They did not breathe. They stood. Then they turned and quietly trotted on. When he got back to the house Boyd was awake but he didn’t tell him where he’d been nor what he’d seen. He never told anybody.
So the book starts with a glorious scene of wolves, antelopes, and a young boy on a snowy moonlit New Mexico plain. The book ends with another canid, this one an old decrepit arthritic dog who:
… stood there inside the door with the rain falling in the weeds and gravel behind it and it was wet and wretched and so scarred and broken that it might have been patched up out of parts of dogs by demented vivisectionists.
Here’s a one sentence paragraph from the middle of the book. The context is Billy and Boyd are on the road in Mexico and on horseback when they come upon a gypsy encampment:
I will say the book can be hard on a reader who is an animal lover. It can also be hard on a reader who is expecting traditional western tropes - Good guy wears a white hat. Bad guy wears a black hat. Black hat does something sh*tty so White hat opens a can of whoop-a$$ on black hat.The horse’s ears quartered the compass for the source of the music.
Hey, that reminds me of a joke:
Dog walks into a bar.
Dog’s got his foot all bandaged up
Dog says, “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw!”