Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Innocents Abroad in an Apocalyptic Appalachia (?) Hiding out in some derelict cabin in some mountainous swampy woods (maybe Appalachia?) in some time (late 19th or early 20th century?), siblings Culla and Rinthy Holme (an ironic family name for the homeless pair) become young, unready parents of their (!?) baby. Culla can’t accept “the chap,” “a beet-colored creature that looked to him like a skinned squirrel,” and takes it from the labor-drained mother (his teenaged sister!) and abandons it in the woods and tells her it died. A nosy (saintly?) “gnomic” itinerant tinker (who mule-like pulls his own wagon and but for cocoa sells everything, including books with “sorry illustrations” of “grotesquely coital couples”) follows Culla’s tracks, rescues (steals?) the baby and brings it to some town to find a nurse for it. When Rinthy discovers that the baby didn’t die and looks at her brother, he panics and runs away, and Rinthy sets off looking for her baby by hunting the tinker. Outer Dark (1968) then depicts the siblings’ contrasting odysseys—Culla escaping, Rinthy searching—through “a landscape of the damned,” where sunlight is “an agony” and the dark more distressing than the dark of blindness: “The flowers in the dooryard have curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark and there is a mockingbird to tell what he knows of night.” This novel is almost reminiscent of McCarthy’s later The Road (2006), though that book’s father and son team is more poignant than Rinthy and Culla, who are not exactly traveling together. The ignorant, innocent siblings wander through insular, shabby towns and past ramshackle, isolated dwellings set in a beautiful and hostile natural world, encountering an assortment of grotesque denizens, from families to solitary widows and widowers. While people mostly are kind and helpful to Rinthy, they are often suspicious of and hostile to Culla, blaming him for any local crime or catastrophe. Indeed, one of the men Culla meets in his peregrinations tells him, “I don't believe you're no bad feller and no lucky feller neither.” It is interesting how calamity and mayhem accompany Culla without his fully being aware of it. Woven here and there through those parallel road trips are the murderous travels of three demonic figures, comprised of a philosophical bearded man and his two acolytes, one mute and one mentally challenged. With casual efficiency and atrocious good humor, they kill anyone they meet. Are they following or leading Culla and or Rinthy? McCarthy wouldn’t have either or both siblings run into the three demons, would he? And while we’re asking, will Rinthy ever find her baby or Culla Rinthy? Did the tinker manage to find a good home for the newborn “chap”? Will the baby redeem the fallen world? It's impressive how McCarthy gets us to root for the (probably) incestuous brother and sister, homeless orphans without anything of their own in the world. Perhaps Rinthy is superior to Culla because she at least wants something—her baby—and ever retains a natural, sacred grace despite (or because of) her bare feet, threadbare raiment, and lactating aching breasts: “She gave him a little curtsying nod, ragged, shoeless, deferential, and halfderanged, and yet moving in an almost palpable amnion of propriety.” The novel is vintage Cormac McCarthy: uneducated and ignorant but intelligent and articulate people engage in laconic, demotic, almost poetic conversations; work and craft are carefully depicted; apocalyptic natural settings stun the mind’s eye; amoral killers operate for opaque purposes; unpredictable and awful violence suddenly erupts; godless biblical similes compare people to lone acolytes, trembling penitents, witless paracletes, ruinous prophets, disciples of darkness, gospel miscreants, crippled marionettes, the morbidly tranquil drowned, spiders hanging in the darkness of a well; and everything combines to evoke a feeling of impending doom. He writes grand set piece scenes of catastrophe and terror, like a ferry crossing a raging river at night or some men driving a vast polychrome tide of hogs along a bluff or Culla finding the wrong campfire or even Rinthy modestly seeing a doctor. Ed Sala is a great reader for McCarthy, because his gravelly voice convincingly handles the long sentences and difficult words and dialect-inflected dialogue and evokes the ominous significance of it all. If you like McCarthy’s overwrought, bleak, and beautiful writing, you would like this novel. It might traumatize people who have had babies or wanted babies. It might disturb pious Christians who believe that God knows what he’s doing and has us act according to His divine plan and who believe that preachers are efficacious and sinners pernicious. Despite its awful things, I found reading this novel to be a strange pleasure: “Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen and near mute with dew. On their chairs in such immobility, these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.” View all my reviews
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