No punctuation for old men
I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, not because of the just-released Coen brothers film, but as a result of enjoying another book of his – The Road. The two novels have certain parallels: while The Road is about a man and his son’s journey through a post-apocalyptic American landscape, as one succumbs to radiation sickness caused by an unspecified cataclysmic event, No Country covers the more individual apocalypse resulting from someone’s decision to make off with a satchel of money found at the scene of a drug deal gone wrong.
What I’m finding difficult to deal with is McCarthy’s writing style. In short, he almost totally eschews punctuation, with the exception of full stops and question marks. There are a very few commas and apostrophes, the latter of which seem to be rather erratically applied – present and correct in “I’m”, but missing altogether from “cants” and “wouldnts”.
In The Road, this device seemed to work; it echoed the shattered worldview of the novel – when civilisation has been all but destroyed, what use is there for the tiny, niggling elements of written language when that very language is struggling to survive?
(Incidentally, I’m aware that my description of The Road’s plot makes it sound like a bad sci-fi novel, and that would be an utterly inaccurate description. It’s a far more grounded tale, imagining the true consequences of the presumed nuclear war. There are no monsters here beyond humanity itself and the psychological horror of the near total emptiness of the remaining world.)
Nevertheless, this low-punctuation style appears in No Country for Old Men (and, presumably, McCarthy’s other works). But for me it doesn’t work here; it achieves nothing beyond being a rather overt and intrusive statement of the writer’s style. Maybe it’s the grammar freak in me coming out – I spend a fair bit of time proofreading text at work – but every time I come across a missing apostrophe or suchlike it creates a hitch in the flow of reading. The lack of speech marks are a particular bugbear, making conversations awkward to decipher at times. Lynne Truss would probably blow a gasket. Or…ha-hah!…lapse into a comma.
Despite all this, I am enjoying the novel. I just have that sneaking temptation to send Cormac McCarthy a package of little apostrophes and inverted commas in a pepper shaker, so that he could sprinkle it over his writing and season to taste.