When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked towards the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the chill led him by the hand.

So many things seem to have disappeared; so little seems to remain. I feel appalled, almost at a loss where to begin.

Close Reading

Three things dominate my reading this week. Let’s start with the first.

It’s almost a cliché in the kind of folk-horror novels I like to read to relax (I know) that a character suddenly becomes aware of an absence. Usually it’s silence – the absence of birdsong in the forest, for example. When it’s done well, it works tremendously. If you want to read silence being deployed by a master, then go and find out what happens to Candy’s dog in Of Mice and Men.¹

I mention this because it’s my habit to skim something I’m going to be close-reading (or marking). This time, before I began reading, I was more taken aback than I can probably describe by the absence of commas.

Punctuation IS important, as all the amusing posters remind us. They are the signs on the map of the page which tell us how to navigate the words: how to read what’s in front of us for meaning, for tone and inflection, for pace. A quick exercise for you – say each of these out loud.

It’s a boy.

It’s a boy!

It’s a boy?

It’s a boy …

And get in touch if you finished the last one with ‘dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh’. You are my tribe! 😊

Back to commas.

I probably overuse them, unashamedly too, having absorbed the style from all those Victorian novels I’ve read. When I come across the skilfully deployed comma, like I did when close-reading Mrs Dalloway or The Bloody Chamber, for example? There’s a part of me which rejoices.

What happened to the commas, Cormac?

I tell students to assume that everything on the page is deliberate. And everything off the page, in this case. As I get stuck into the words, I feel the pang of missing those commas. Everything feels that little bit less – less connected, less purposeful, less emotional. As if the opening is just being reported, inflectionless. As if commas (and all those other glorious little marks) are redundant, ‘dropped like luxuries’ as Ted Hughes might say, in the world we have arrived at.²

The first sentence continued to subtly disturb me. As a close reader, even a single word – and its position – can influence my thinking, and what bothered me most was ‘when’. It suggests that whatever is happening here isn’t a camping holiday, but a way of life – sleeping through the night doesn’t happen any more, and the cold is a feature, not an occasion. That sense is sharpened quite soon by McCarthy’s reference to ‘stinking robes and blankets’, and it’s a makeshift ‘plastic tarpaulin’, not a tent, which shelters them.

It worries me that our protagonist’s first thought is to check on the child. Are they in danger? What’s the relationship between them? Why hasn’t the writer given me any names by the time the 100-word guillotine drops? Are names ‘luxuries’ too? Is spending the night indoors, nice and warm, another?

A second thing I’m sensitive to (possibly abnormally so) is the simile.

The one here:

Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world

– is horribly brilliant. Or brilliantly horrible, possibly.

It comes hard on the heels of the suggestion that each day is more gray than the one before. In a different novel, a comma might easily have connected these ideas. Here the separation makes it duller, almost an afterthought. Even the prose seems to have lost some of its energy. Should the idea of every day getting grayer be taken literally? Is it a metaphor for the bleak-sounding existence this pair share? Is it both at the same time? I think it might be, when we consider that it’s ‘dimming away the world’.

Something’s so very wrong. Truthfully, I’m in the territory of The Handmaid’s Tale, where any concern for unnamed individuals is competing with the need to know what has happened to everything and everyone else. The simile has the nasty, insidious connection to disease. It feels a particularly spiteful condition when vision is so important to us as human beings. With the already ever-present cold, this sense of encroaching darkness feels unhappily portentous.

Finally, I read a lot – maybe too much – into directions.

By this I mean compass points. And this is one of those occasions where I continue to read ‘cold’ but still rely on other texts I’ve read along the way. In this case, the first that springs to mind – maybe because it is also dismal, gloomy – is Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’.³ It’s not the only one, but it is one of the reasons I associate the east with dawn, with promise, renewal … ultimately with hope. So when McCarthy takes the time to point out that the protagonist looks to the east, I sense far more than a delayed dawn. Whatever this situation is, whatever is going on, whatever has been lost (punctuation included), there is no immediate promise that things will improve.

What remains, if anything?

Despite the absence of dawn, is there a bright side?

Can we cling to anything as readers which gives us a sense of hope? It has to be the man’s care for the child (incidentally, I’ve just noticed that we don’t even know if the child is a boy or a girl). But the child’s life is ‘precious’ – that’s easily the most hopeful word in the entire first 100. And whether they are related or not, that image of checking whether a child is breathing in the night is one which will sound familiar to parents, I think.

So much of what we’ve read here is wrong, unsettling, actually on the point of being distressing – but that familiar, reassuring rhythm of rise and fall, rise and fall, of a child breathing gives us something to cling to in the cold and increasing dark.

As you read on, look out for:

What has happened, why are we here? As I said earlier, this type of opening often prompts an urgent, immediate need to understand what has gone wrong. When do we find out? How is the information conveyed to us?

How the relationship between the two protagonists is depicted? How much more information do we get about them? Is there a point at which the narrative switches from the ruined world to how these two fare in it?

Glimpses of the positive amongst the ruins. Unless things turn around quite drastically, we’re going to be sailing the bleakest of seas in the novel. Does McCarthy throw us any more lifeboats, or is the child the only one?

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References and Further Reading

1. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937) ↩︎
2. Ted Hughes, ‘Bayonet Charge’ (1957) read at https://poetrybyheart.com/poems/bayonet-charge ↩︎
3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’ (1860) read at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45389/tithonus ↩︎