Discovering a great new writer can be an exhilarating, exciting experience, to use three "e" words in a row. Discovering a great new writer already discovered by everyone else, maybe not so exciting.

It took me forever to get around to reading Cormac McCarthy, and now I want to read everything he's written and ever will write. He's won the National Book Award, had movies made from his books, and already is everyone else's favorite. It's embarrassing to admit I only got around to him now.

But let's turn this around. You haven't read his books yet either. Maybe a friend mentioned The Road, or some time ago you heard that All the Pretty Horses is a pretty good cowboy story.

So for all the people who like me hadn't gotten around to it yet, I have only this to say: Go read him. Don't go to the dance, just stay home and read. You'll be better for it. You'll be hugely entertained, and you'll still have your hearing because the bar band's too loud.

I've heard people say that The Road is the last, best end-of-the-world novel. Last because it's hard to imagine anyone else writing this ancient tale better; best because it's even more bleak than Neville Shute or Mary Shelly, Walter M. Miller or Jerry Pournell and Larry Niven.

A father and his young son trudge down The Road through a blasted landscape. They drag along a grocery cart. They avoid strangers or fight with them. Finally they struggle to the ocean. They are standing at the end of the world in every sense and yet it may also be a new beginning.

All the Pretty Horses is the first novel in McCarthy's Border Trilogy. McCarthy follows three young men and their horses venturing from Texas deep into Mexico, where love and danger await.

The plots don't sound all that amazing, and they aren't. It's the writing, the evocation of time and place, that reminds some reviewers of Faulkner. Reading McCarthy is like roaming through a house stuffed with hand-built furniture. The floors are swept and the chairs are comfortable. Hear that sound? Muddy water is seeping through the threshold and your shoes are getting wet.

From The Road:

... The slow surf crawled and seethed in the dark and he thought about his life but there was no life to think about and after a while he walked back. He got a can of peaches from the bag and opened it and sat before the fire and ate the peaches slowly with his spoon while the boy slept. The fire flared in the wind and sparks raced away down the sand. He set the empty tin between his feet. Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

From All the Pretty Horses:

...He lay on his back in his blankets and looked out where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In that false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella [sic; it should be spelled Capella; see notes below] and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.

I could get all "critic" here and point out that the stars appear throughout All the Pretty Horses and one of the reasons The Road is so bleak is nothing can be seen through the man-made dust covering the sky; that McCarthy is forever sending his characters on quests which make or destroy them; that he tends to indulge just a hair overmuch in philosophical monologues; that he's too much the fool for a pretty woman and over-awed by self-made men.

Those are quibbles. As with all great writers, when you read Cormac McCarthy you step into his world, lay down your doubts, and go where he wants to take you, all night long if that's how long it takes.

What a joy to find a writer like this.

Aired Sunday November 16, 2008 at 10:55 am and Wednesday November 19, 2008 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Vintage International paperback $14.95. ISBN 9780307387899.

The movie was scheduled to release in November, 2008. It appears to have been postponed into 2009, "never a good sign" as a reviewer for the Mississippi Clarion Ledger wrote.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. Vintage International paperback $14.95. ISBN 9780679744399.

Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy begins with All the Pretty Horses, and continues with The Crossing and Cities of the Plain.

Post-apocalyptic books whose authors are mentioned above:

Neville Shute: On the Beach
Mary Shelly: The Last Man
Walter M. Miller: A Canticle for Liebowitz
Jerry Pournell and Larry Niven: Lucifer's Hammer

"Astroprof" blogs about the star Capella:

Most star names that we use today are Arabic, but Capella is one of the few stars with a Latin name (all the constellations are named in Latin, but we use very few Latin names for stars). The Arabic name often given for Capella is Alhajoth, meaning goat. That fits with the Latin, for Capella means little she-goat. The star Capella to the Romans represented Amalthea, the goat that suckled Jupiter in mythology. The early Arabs, though, called the star Al Rakib, the Driver, which makes sense if Auriga is a chariot driver. In India, Capella was known as Brahma Ridaya, the Heart of Brahma. Many English poets referred to Capella as the Shepherd's Star.

Being rather far north, Capella is up for nearly 18 hours per day here in Texas, but the farther north that you go, the longer it is up. It is circumpolar, meaning that it never sets, for pretty much all of Canada, with the exception of Toronto, which is just barely too far south, but even there it is up for all but a few minutes per day.

I have always rather liked Capella, and I know a few people who regard it as their favorite star. So, go take a look for yourself.

-- Astroprof http://astroprofspage.com/archives/560

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