Opinion Express View on Cormac McCarthy: Death and life

In a rare interview in 2005, Cormac McCarthy said, “Death is the major issue in the world… To not be able to talk about it is very odd.” Was that why the American novelist, who died this week at the age of 89, dwelt for so long on the subject? Death is the inescapable, implacable fact of existence and in McCarthy’s works, it was incarnated in the figures of Judge Holden, the hateful, war god-like enigma at the heart of Blood Meridian, in the assassin Anton Chigurh, pursuing his unlucky quarry across the Texan desert in No Country For Old Men.

Born in Rhode Island and raised in Tennessee, McCarthy was a rebel from a young age, lashing out against his “respectable” upbringing in a middle-class household. He dropped out of college, served in the US Air Force for four years — where he devoured books to stave off boredom — and, after re-enrolling in college, dropped out a second time to pursue a career in writing. While he drew critical attention early for his propulsive, lyrical prose, popular acclaim came only with the publication of All The Pretty Horses, his sixth novel.

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With all their blood-letting, McCarthy’s works were not easy to read. Even his great champion, the literary critic Harold Bloom, admitted that he could finally read Blood Meridian, considered by many to be McCarthy’s masterpiece, only on his third attempt because of its “overwhelming carnage”. But the violence served to show all that the human soul could endure and overcome. Whether in the final, heroic confrontation that the anti-hero of Blood Meridian has with the Judge (despite its fatal consequence) or the courage and fierce, mutual love that keeps the unnamed father-son duo going in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road — the reader could glimpse a reaffirmation of life amidst death.