OUTER DARK

This 1968 novel written by Cormac McCarthy is brilliant but also one of the most disheartening stories that I’ve ever read. Warning: If you are suffering from depression, don’t even think about reading this somber book. Cormac is truly the gloom and doom master. A quote from All the Pretty Horses sums up Mr. McCarthy’s thoughts on life: ”It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.” One of Cormac’s Outer Dark quotes is: “Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.” One of the two main characters, Culla states bleakness best when talking to the mysterious bearded man and says, ”I never give nobody nothin, I never had nothin. Never figured nothin, never had nothin, never was nothin, the man said. He was looking at nothin at all.” I added the quotations, but Cormac doesn’t use them or any other basic elements of prose in his novels. If you have read any of my reviews, you know that I’m not a fan of his famous novel The Road ; however, I do admire this novel. He has stated in the past that if the story is good enough, the author doesn’t have to be grammatically correct. I hear you loud and clear! This story will stay with me for awhile.

Even though Cormac doesn’t mention a time or place, I did some basic research, and it seems that this story takes place in the Appalachia mountains of east Tennessee. I can’t find a time period, but it felt like I was reading a novel set in the early 1900s. It’s the story of a brother and sister, Culla and Rinthy, who have an incestious relationship resulting in a baby. Both of these people are destitute mountain people of low education living in a rural cabin. As Rinthy recovers from the birth, she hears a tinker (a travelling seller of pots and pans) outside talking to her brother. The tinker leaves, and while Rinthy sleeps, Culla goes in the woods and leaves the baby in the glade to die. When Culla goes home, he chops a fake grave with his axe. The tinker finds the baby. When Rinthy wakes, Culla says the baby died. She discovers that the grave is fake and thinking that her brother sold her baby to the tinker, she leaves on foot pursuing the tinker. Culla also leaves on foot seemingly looking for his sister but more likely because he is fleeing from his sins and just wants to get away. To complicate matters for Culla, three mysterious men apparently follow him causing death and mayhem in his wake. Rinthy, in her travels, finds people mostly accommodating to her plight. Culla, Rinthy, the baby, the tinker, and the three mysterious men are heading for a collision of monumental and unguessable fruition. You must read this, McCarthy’s precocious second novel; it is stunning.

I find this story full of symbolism and metaphors. For instance, Culla and the three mysterious men seem to have nothing in common. But why do the three men appear to follow Culla from town to town, causing Culla many troubles. The leader of the men wears black, the color of evil and death. Culla seems to be running from his sins, and the three men are in pursuit to mete out punishment. Evil looms all around Culla. Are the three men emissaries of the devil? Rinthy, on the other hand, receives food and shelter from most of the people she meets on her quest to find her baby. Do these people represent the Archangels of God? I don’t know, but I do know when I’m reading a book full of symbolism. And what of the mean tinker? Who does he portray? And finally, who is the blind man Culla meets at the end of the novel who says, “But I knowed I’d seen ye afore.” Culla wants to know if the blind man is a preacher, and the blind man says, ”No. No preacher. What is they to preach? It’s all plain enough. Word and flesh. I don’t hold much with preachin.” Is this the Grim Reaper, now hot on Culla’s trail? I don’t know, but it’s fun conjecturing.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: Cormac McCarthy is 79 years old, and has written 10 novels in three different genres: Southern Gothic, Western, and Post apocalyptic. He says he is working on a long novel (that’s unusual!) called The Passenger. Three (there’s that number again) of his novels have been adapted for film. No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for best picture. He has done very well for one who violates most of the rules of writing, grammar, and punctuation.

Goodreads says that one of Cormac’s famous quotes is from his novel, The Road: “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” That’s pretty good writing for someone who makes his own criteria.

Vulture on 6/6/07 said that Cormac bombed on the Oprah Winfrey show: "On yesterday's show, McCarthy wasn't as gnomically apocalyptic as we’d speculated he would be. Slouching in an overstuffed armchair, he seemed more like a nice-enough old man, gamely trying to answer the inane questions posed by the over enthusiastic woman sitting opposite. Winfrey trotted out such chestnuts as "Where did the idea for this novel come from?" and "Do you have a writing routine?" McCarthy, to his credit, treated the questions seriously, though that may be because he's the only writer on earth who's never heard them before.”

And lastly, a quote from chapter one of All the Pretty Horses shows Cormac’s descriptive style: "They rode together a last time on a day in early March when the weather had already warmed and yellow mexicanhat bloomed by the roadside. They unladed the horses at McCullough's and rode up through the middle pasture along Grape Creek and into the low hills. The creek was clear and green with trailing moss braided over the gravel bars. They rode slowly up through the open country among scrub mesquite and nopal. They crossed from Tom Green County into Coke County They crossed the old Schonover road and they rode up through broken hills dotted with cedar where the ground was cobbled with traprock and they could see snow on the thin blue ranges a hundred miles to the north." Rules or no rules, this man can write!