The Orchard Keeper - a slow start

The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy (Random House: 1965). The story of an out of the way community between the world wars. A bootlegger kills a hitchhiker and later unwittingly befriends his son.

Everyone’s got to start somewhere, right? There are some jerk’s who start with masterpieces. I hate those guys. The naturally talented sort who seem to be able to just spit out perfection at their first shot. The guys who were clearly better at football than everyone else since they were about three years old. The kind that could kick a conversion from the halfway line about two seconds after they learned to walk. The kind that could draw a bowl of fruit that looked better than the real thing whilst the rest of us were still struggling to hold the pencil the right way round.

Cormac McCarthy is not one of those jerks.

This is a guy who has written some amazing stuff. I’ve reviewed The Sunset Limited here before. I was a fan, as I am of a couple of his other books. Enough people love this guy for a handful of his books to have translated into big budget movies. The Road. No Country for Old Men. These things don’t make their way from his laptop in the early hours of a Tuesday morning to the Screen 1 down the Odeon on a Friday night by luck. A lot of people have to be fans, and a lot of people have to spend a lot of their money for it to happen.

No doubt, Cormac McCarthy is very good at writing. But he had to start somewhere. And The Orchard Keeper is it. This is his first published book. So I thought it’d be interesting to find out how he kicked off.

Disappointment doesn’t quite cover it. I opened the first page all eager. I was all set to connect at the roots with one of American literature’s greatest living writers. This came out in 1965, and made enough of a splash to get McCarthy noticed and start an illustrious career.

By about page ten, I knew this wasn’t going to live up to all of that. For starts, the story jumped around like a flea in a jumping around circus in which the fleas are forced to jump around more than fleas naturally jump around.

I’m all for a complex story line. I’m all for strands being laid down, dropped, picked up again. Weave it correctly, and it can make for a rich experience. But that didn’t happen here. All that happened was mass confusion. I honestly couldn’t tell you much about what happened in this story. I’m still not even sure why it’s called The Orchard Keeper. I spent so much time flicking back and forth trying to figure out who was who and what was what that it all ended up being a chore.

Elmore - not a fan of hooptedoodle

For twos, the sections which I decided just to sit and read weren’t that great either. I mean, the writing was good. The guy can create scenery and atmosphere that can knock your socks off. But then I was there, sockless, and it kept going. Elmore Leonard talks about avoiding too much hooptedoodle in writing. Me, I tend to think there’s room for a bit of hooptedoodle when it’s well done and indulged in with moderation. But moderation had left the building here. McCarthy kept going and going and going.

There was just no balance. I love an atmospheric book. I love pages that can take you to complete other places and keep you there for hours. I love writers that create tastes and sounds and smells and light. There doesn’t always need to be huge amounts of plot behind it. But it does need to have some meaning that breaks the surface. There needs to be a structure behind it. Steinbeck does it. McCarthy does it too, just not on his first time out.

So no, didn’t really enjoy this one. There were good bits, a few little anecdotes that worked, scene setting passages that warmed me (until they dragged on).

But when the last page went by, I was pleased to be done with this.

2 GBR

On to the next one. A German novella next week. Think that’s the first time I’ve ever said that sentence.

The Sunset Limited - a "huh" of a book

The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy (2006: Vintage Books. First published in the UK in 2010 by Picador). A novel written as a conversation between two men – one an ex-con ex-addict who has found God, the other a professor whose world view has led him to the brink of suicide. Between them, they debate which is more valid - the ex-con’s hope or the professor’s lack of it.

It was never going to be a cheery ride from the man that brought you No Country for Old Men and The Road. If Coldplay is “music to slit your wrists by” then Cormac McCarthy seems to be the literary equivalent. If I were his parents, I’d be worried about that boy.

Not a frown-upside-down sort of book then. But let’s not write it off entirely just because it fails in the cheeriness stakes.

It is, as the cover suggests, a “novel in dramatic form.” Which means the entire book has the look of a script. It’s easier to read than most scripts, mainly because it’s a two way dialogue set in a single room; just two voices to keep track of, 140-odd pages of a single conversation.

I did, however, breeze through it. Not entirely with a hop in my step, of course, but with a furrow of thought etched firmly on my forehead.

This is a thinker of a book, slap bang in the “really makes you think, huh” genre. The script style really works, mainly because McCarthy achieves two very distinct voices and maintains them with a strict discipline. It’s easy to forget that the two characters are products of the same mind. You really do feel like a fly on the wall of really quite an interesting conversation.

And what a conversation. The cover (rather dramatically) touts it as a debate over the meaning of life. Don’t let that put you off too much though. It’s not all grand statement and metaphysical dilemma. That does creep in of course, but McCarthy delivers the big questions (and struggling answers) in such an authentic voice that it doesn’t jar (much); it doesn’t appear too forced or unnatural.

Another tick in the credit column is the length. I think McCarthy has got this just about right. It’s a very quick read. Novella length really, and the script format means that the pages fly by. Which is needed. Dwelling on a single conversation in a single room for too long could be fatal. Similarly, tackling the themes he does without giving enough room for you to ease into it is a big danger. The book steers well between the two potential gutters.

So, it’s a clever, thought provoking, well paced, well written book. But (and it’s perhaps the biggest but outside of hip hop) it didn’t force me back into my seat. I didn’t look at it longingly, counting the seconds until I could pick it up again and have a bit of a read. When I turned the last page, I uttered out loud the kind of “huh” that is more commonly provoked by finding out I’ve got 50p more than I thought I had in my pocket. This was not a “wow, I just found a £20 note under the sofa” book.

Interesting? Yes.

Worth reading? Certainly.

Worth shouting from the roof tops about? Breathtaking? Joyful? No, no and no.

6 GBR

Not a bad score in the context of GBR, which is turning out to be quite a strict scale. 6 GBR is good. 6 GBR means go read it. It won’t take much time, and you’ll be glad you did.

Just don’t expect it to change your life.


p.s. Just found out the book was also made into a TV film for HBO starring Samuel L Jackson and Tommy Lee. Aired in the States in Feb apparently. Might have to try and get me a copy of that. God bless our dual region DVD player...