2010/43

Cormac McCarthy: The Orchard Keeper (246p.)

With The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy’s debut (1954), I have now regressed to the early part of his (stellar) career which isn’t set in America’s southwest (unlike his Border Trilogy, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men), but in the southeast, rural Tennessee, across the Great Smokies from North-Carolina where the lady and I once happily lived.

I’d say both the language and the narrative aren’t yet fully developed the way they have come to be in the meantime, but The Orchard Keeper is a McCarthy all right, worth anyone’s time, especially if you’re into Americana, and already speaks of McCarthy’s deep sense of longing for a time past and undone, when life still had an edge to it (before Twitter and Facebook).  

From the back page: ‘… it tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy’s father. …’

The old man took a sidepath that led along a spur of the mountain, cutting a spiderstick as he went to clear the way where huge nets were strung tree to tree across the path dew-laden and glinting like strands of drawn glass, bringing them down with a sticky whisper while the spiders fled over the wrecked and dangling floss. He came out on a high bald knoll that looked over the valley and he stopped here and studied it as a man might cresting a hill and seeing a strange landscape for the first time. Pines and cedars in a swath of dark green piled down the mountain to the left and ceased again where the road cut through. Beyond that a field and a log hogpen, the shakes spilling down the broken roof, looking like some diminutive settler’s cabin in ruins. Through the leaves of the hardwoods he could see the zinc-colored roof of the church faintly coruscant and a patch of boarded siding weathered the paper-gray of a waspnest. And far in the distance the long purple welts of the Great Smokies.