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Rating: The world of Cormac McCarthy is always adrift: whether it's the hyper-violent and scorched one of "Blood Meridian" or the already destroyed and blackened one of "The Road," McCarthy has always placed more importance on the scenario itself than on the characters. This is also what happens in his first book, "The Orchard Keeper," published in 1965.
The trees remain black, the water icy, the landscape austere and marked by the inexorable passage of time. The scenario depicted by McCarthy is suffering, just like the people who move within it. They are lost souls in the alcohol and solitude of Red Branch: Marion, John, and Ather. Three different characters but united and closely connected. The first is a whiskey smuggler, the second a young amateur hunter, the third a man destroyed by time and solitude who finds his reason for being in Nature. In this last character, the grumpy Ather, many critics see a reflection of Cormac McCarthy himself. At the time still young but already perfectly capable of developing his own poetic of nature and blood.
The Orchard Keeper progresses through endless descriptions of lost scenarios, ancient hunting legends, stories of suffering and blood: beneath a plot of whiskey, suspicions, and unspoken things. The expository genius of future books is missing (as already in the subsequent "Outer Dark"), but McCarthy immediately stands out for his personality, courage, unforgettable pages, sudden philosophical outbursts of pessimistic acceptance of the human condition. The myth hovers, transforming into mist, rain, ash...
"They are all gone now. Fled, exiled in death or lost, ruined. Sun and wind still traverse that land, burning and shaking the trees, the grass. Of those people, no incarnation, no descendant, no trace remains. On the lips of the alien race now residing in those places, their names are myth, legend, dust."
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