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viktor_haagFinished the last two McCarthy books on my shelf in relatively short order. I ripped through "The Road" in two or three days; despite the fact that it looks like a three hundred page novel physically, it's not really. The paper stock is thicker than usual, and the type density is much lower than usual. Dedicated readers could probably get through it in a single sitting.
Typical of the McCarthy I've read, "The Road" is for the most part built of straightforward, deceptively simple prose that keeps you page flipping. Every now and then it spirals off a bit into philosophical musings and conversations that are much denser. I thought that, in "The Road" these passages were well placed, in spots where McCarthy probably wants you to be slowing down as a reader anyway. "The Road" has won this year's Pulitzer which, I suppose, is the American equivalent of the Man Booker. I was never really transported by the writing in "The Road", as I was with passages from "All The Pretty Horses" or "The Crossing", but there are still bits and pieces of the book that lodge firmly in your head and refuse to leave.
In this respect it's sort of akin to thematic cousins "Never Let Me Go" and "Children Of Men" which I've also recently consumed.
I think I can see why Oprah has latched on to "The Road" rather than any other McCarthy work. It's accessible. It's about the relationship between a parent and a child. It appears to be gruesomely topical (I'm not sure it is, really, as the setting and plot are so sparingly drawn that it's hard to think of this book as the polemic or cautionary tale that, for example, "Handmaid's Tale" attempts to be).
But there's no doubt that "The Road" is a good book (critics call it "Harrowing!" which is a different word than "harrowing", and really, it's neither. McCarthy's simple, dogged style and unflinchingly flowing construction refuses to let you despair too much or focus on the "big picture", rather, like the father does for the son in the book, his narrative forces you to pay attention to the small detail of putting one foot in front of the other in a forced march to the sea.
"Cities On The Plain", on the other hand, is more complex and, really, not so well written I don't think. Like the previous two volumes of his Border Trilogy, "Cities" has similar style and attention to rural detail. Unlike the previous two volumes, the characters seem strangely flat and stereotypical: the wise (but not too wise) and impotent old rancher, the devoted ethnic housekeeper, the savvy pack of ranch-hands, the decadent and sordid mexican man of coin (unlike the previous books where men approaching this type dealt in livestock with four legs, in "Cities" they deal mostly in livestock with two).
I suppose morality plays can tend to painted backdrops and stock characters, and "Cities" certainly has its moments where the writing or the complexity of the protagonists help you forget about the sets, but overall I found it the weakest of the three books and the hardest to get through, the epilogue hardest of all (a book should not get harder to finish the farther you get in, should it?).
The rambly "50 years later" epilogue seemed, in retrospect, to rather like a warm-up exercise for "The Road" and not really a satisfying conclusion to the tales of Cole and Parham. I'm still glad I read all three of the Border books, but I can't help but feel that it didn't finish with strength, and that the elegiac conclusion felt more like wild-eyed in-coherency than grand visionary incision. Still, if you liked the first two, then you'll almost certainly like the third: it's not as good as the first two, but that doesn't mean it's bad - these four books by McCarthy are the best things I've read in a long, long time. (Well, to be fair, probably only a few months: I would place the best of LeGuin easily alongside McCarthy and the Ishiguro I read over the holidays is easily as good.)
Typical of the McCarthy I've read, "The Road" is for the most part built of straightforward, deceptively simple prose that keeps you page flipping. Every now and then it spirals off a bit into philosophical musings and conversations that are much denser. I thought that, in "The Road" these passages were well placed, in spots where McCarthy probably wants you to be slowing down as a reader anyway. "The Road" has won this year's Pulitzer which, I suppose, is the American equivalent of the Man Booker. I was never really transported by the writing in "The Road", as I was with passages from "All The Pretty Horses" or "The Crossing", but there are still bits and pieces of the book that lodge firmly in your head and refuse to leave.
In this respect it's sort of akin to thematic cousins "Never Let Me Go" and "Children Of Men" which I've also recently consumed.
I think I can see why Oprah has latched on to "The Road" rather than any other McCarthy work. It's accessible. It's about the relationship between a parent and a child. It appears to be gruesomely topical (I'm not sure it is, really, as the setting and plot are so sparingly drawn that it's hard to think of this book as the polemic or cautionary tale that, for example, "Handmaid's Tale" attempts to be).
But there's no doubt that "The Road" is a good book (critics call it "Harrowing!" which is a different word than "harrowing", and really, it's neither. McCarthy's simple, dogged style and unflinchingly flowing construction refuses to let you despair too much or focus on the "big picture", rather, like the father does for the son in the book, his narrative forces you to pay attention to the small detail of putting one foot in front of the other in a forced march to the sea.
"Cities On The Plain", on the other hand, is more complex and, really, not so well written I don't think. Like the previous two volumes of his Border Trilogy, "Cities" has similar style and attention to rural detail. Unlike the previous two volumes, the characters seem strangely flat and stereotypical: the wise (but not too wise) and impotent old rancher, the devoted ethnic housekeeper, the savvy pack of ranch-hands, the decadent and sordid mexican man of coin (unlike the previous books where men approaching this type dealt in livestock with four legs, in "Cities" they deal mostly in livestock with two).
I suppose morality plays can tend to painted backdrops and stock characters, and "Cities" certainly has its moments where the writing or the complexity of the protagonists help you forget about the sets, but overall I found it the weakest of the three books and the hardest to get through, the epilogue hardest of all (a book should not get harder to finish the farther you get in, should it?).
The rambly "50 years later" epilogue seemed, in retrospect, to rather like a warm-up exercise for "The Road" and not really a satisfying conclusion to the tales of Cole and Parham. I'm still glad I read all three of the Border books, but I can't help but feel that it didn't finish with strength, and that the elegiac conclusion felt more like wild-eyed in-coherency than grand visionary incision. Still, if you liked the first two, then you'll almost certainly like the third: it's not as good as the first two, but that doesn't mean it's bad - these four books by McCarthy are the best things I've read in a long, long time. (Well, to be fair, probably only a few months: I would place the best of LeGuin easily alongside McCarthy and the Ishiguro I read over the holidays is easily as good.)
