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Rating: The words chosen by Cormac McCarthy hurt, deeply. One might almost think of them as "gratuitous." They are everyday terms that, placed in the damned position where the American author places them, create discomfort, almost despondency. McCarthy seems almost unwilling to use subjects that are not suffering, seeming to find himself much more at ease in the degraded past than in contemporaneity.
"Outer Dark" is the second novel written by McCarthy, published in 1968 three years after his literary debut, titled "The Orchard Keeper". This book (rather sparse, around 200 pages) focuses on two particular characters. Culla and Rinthy are brother and sister, but this did not prevent Culla from getting his sister pregnant. In the desolation of their lives, the landscape, and their complete economic lack, Culla decides without much hesitation to abandon the newborn in the woods, where it is found by a tinker and taken with him. For the two characters, it is the beginning of a quest: Rinthy wants her child back, Culla wants to find his sister. Their journey takes place in a "plastic" nature, omnipresent, almost a character in its own right accompanying all who move in this story. The setting is an indecipherable part of the United States, although the oft-mentioned Johnson County leads us to deduce that the novel is set in Kansas. The landscape evoked by McCarthy is a dark cloak of desolation and despair in which the two protagonists, already burdened by a difficult personal situation, seem to find no escape. It is a perfectly constructed nature, showing itself as a "stepmother", a bloody backdrop to a story with decaying hues.
Sudden bursts of violence make "Outer Dark" a book I wouldn't recommend to everyone. Indeed, despite a depiction that exudes oppression and difficulty on every page, within the novel, there are genuine stabs of brutality that annihilate with their raw starkness, almost unexpected in the boundless progress through the desolate countryside evoked by the author. These are brilliant flashes of narrative power that give the entire work an aura of surreality that shifts from a horror tone to the more heart-wrenching and painful one of love for one's child. In this sense, the two main figures appear sharply opposed in their psychological characterization. Rinthy is obsessed and determined to find her child at all costs, driven by an unconditional love that grows with physical hardship. Culla, on the other hand, seems almost indifferent to everything, and his character takes on the appearance of a scarecrow moved only by the desire to scrape together some money to then search for his sister.
Within this black chaos of dark terms and situations that almost always resolve into manifestations of violence, there is a "character" that closely follows Culla's every move, dragging along a long history of murders and situations of outright brutality. A mysterious trio. The inevitable ending takes on traits of unspeakable violence, leaving one a bit dazed in front of a description, an unexpected succession of events that makes you reflect on human meanness and indifference. The further into the novel you go, the more you read pages where hope completely gives way to harshness, where elements linked to death multiply, where everything appears fixed in a malefic tableau within which man must pay with suffering for his wrongs and choices to manage to get by in a world that does not look benevolently upon him.
At the end of such a journey, a trip of webs and carcasses where the whiteness of bones and the blackness of blood emerge, one is left blind, headed towards a swamp that resembles a muddy, sucking "vulva"...
"They say in hell, souls have no name. Yet they must have been called something to be sent down there."
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