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chrissych 's review for:
The Orchard Keeper
by Cormac McCarthy
I find myself siding with some of the other reviewers who have hailed McCarthy's first novel as an imperfect foreshadowing of what was to come from him. While it carries some traces of his genius, particularly in the myriad passing descriptions of nature and its cold indifference to man, or in the sense of foreboding that seems to curl its fingers with subtle persistence into his prose, The Orchard Keeper is significantly more opaque than most of his later works. I don't disagree with others who have argued that it is unnecessarily so.
The (loose, often ambiguous) narrative follows a young boy and the two societal outcasts who come to mentor him: Marion Sylder, a prohibition-era bootlegger, and Uncle Ather, an aging hermit with a tragic and never-fully-revealed past. The two relationships evolve slowly over the course of the novel and without clear characterization, arc, or resolution, and the two mentors overlap on the periphery. An overarching theme of moral ambiguity adds to the general opacity.
I'm of two minds: on the one hand, the Tennessee landscape painted in the pages between the "story" is as vivid as any McCarthy has written since; on the other hand, it doesn't offer much more with any coherence. There are kernels of meaning and transcendent depth to be found in the characters and their interactions, but the bulk of the cognitive demands required for the reading are spent trying to decode which characters are present in a given scene and who the "he" refers to at any point.
I'm moreover torn on whether McCarthy meant for it to be this way-- as some sort of meta-depiction of the complexity, absence of meaning, and outsider uncertainty inherent in real human interactions, as if the reader were a ghost passing by and happening to overhear threads of narrative through various conversations--, or whether he was a new writer armed with beautiful prose but no experience weighing what he knows as the writer against what a reader could possibly glean from his words.
Nevertheless, it's inspiring to see his work transition from this hopeful yet lacking shred of beauty to the full-blown mastery of setting, character, language, and mood that define his later fiction.
The (loose, often ambiguous) narrative follows a young boy and the two societal outcasts who come to mentor him: Marion Sylder, a prohibition-era bootlegger, and Uncle Ather, an aging hermit with a tragic and never-fully-revealed past. The two relationships evolve slowly over the course of the novel and without clear characterization, arc, or resolution, and the two mentors overlap on the periphery. An overarching theme of moral ambiguity adds to the general opacity.
I'm of two minds: on the one hand, the Tennessee landscape painted in the pages between the "story" is as vivid as any McCarthy has written since; on the other hand, it doesn't offer much more with any coherence. There are kernels of meaning and transcendent depth to be found in the characters and their interactions, but the bulk of the cognitive demands required for the reading are spent trying to decode which characters are present in a given scene and who the "he" refers to at any point.
I'm moreover torn on whether McCarthy meant for it to be this way-- as some sort of meta-depiction of the complexity, absence of meaning, and outsider uncertainty inherent in real human interactions, as if the reader were a ghost passing by and happening to overhear threads of narrative through various conversations--, or whether he was a new writer armed with beautiful prose but no experience weighing what he knows as the writer against what a reader could possibly glean from his words.
Nevertheless, it's inspiring to see his work transition from this hopeful yet lacking shred of beauty to the full-blown mastery of setting, character, language, and mood that define his later fiction.