The natural weight of words.(No Country for Old Men)(Book Review)

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy; Picador, 2004, $30.

WORDS, INDEPENDENT of any writer, have a weight and a power of their own. Blood. Water. Heart. Stone. Just their sound can conjure vague and awful significance. Cormac McCarthy, at his best, reminds me of this power.

But, at times, McCarthy over-writes. There are too many words. They begin to clash and destroy each other and McCarthy's power to give them their head dies with them. Ted Hughes--when he's wallowing in blood and death and the world of things rather than of men, an animal akin to McCarthy---describes how this is what happens in bad poetry. And, at his worst, that's just what McCarthy sounds like: bad poetry.

No Country for Old Men, McCarthy's new book, is unlike any of his others. It even looks different: the sections and chapters are shorter, the text much more spaced out on the page. The long sentences, with their rolling rhythms, are gone. So is the voice of the ponderous, pompous, prairie philosopher that made the last two volumes of The Border Trilogy so annoying.

These changes make the book McCarthy's most readable, and that's almost certainly the point. The publishers may have had a word. McCarthy, always silent in the past, has even given a few interviews to coincide with the release. All this may help sales. But it's damaged McCarthy's legend amongst his early followers, the acolytes; the legend of the lone desert prophet, withdrawn from the strut and trade of charms on the literary stages, which McCarthy's been cultivating, all these years, from down on his Mexican ranch.

The new book, about good people and bad people in the world of border drug smuggling, is never bad poetry. But nor is it ever great writing, as some of McCarthy's other books are. It doesn't take enough risks to be great writing. Blood Meridian took risks, and gory grandeur--a savage beauty, sort of Aztec--was the result. Some of the other books are also superb. Child of God has a dark simplicity that almost makes it McCarthy's best. The Orchard Keeper has a chill that cuts to the bone.

American writing at its most powerful--in Twain, in Melville, in the readable portions of Faulkner or Mailer--has been the verbal music of England made stronger and harsher. McCarthy continues this tradition. The old dream of many American writers and intellectuals was that a complete "American" language, pure, less affected than the old tongue of England, would grow up in the new continent. Generally, this has not happened. American public language is verbose, abstract and Germanic. It is bound and fuddled by interminable prefixes, suffixes, and ugly, cliched, de-humanising neologisms (like "de-humanising" really). McCarthy at his peak, like Emily Dickinson's "true poet", rinses all this clean.