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The Sunset Limited
By Cormac McCarthy
Picador £9.99
145 pages
Dateline: 30th May, 2010
I spend a vastly disproportionate amount of my life watching what I
thought were plays. If the front cover of the new book from Cormac McCarthy
is to be believed, perhaps my average evening out is spent observing
"a novel in dramatic form".
McCarthy is, of course, best known for his novels in silver screen
form such as The Road and No Country for Old Men.
The Sunset Limited looks like a play and indeed, long before
its first UK publication, had been performed on stage by Steppenwolf,
first in Chicago and then at 59E59 in New York, by Freeman Coffey and
the highly respected actor/director/writer, Austin Pendleton.
Whatever it may be, this is a great read and undoubtedly would work
well in the hands of gifted performers on stage. It manages to be, at
the same time, a bit of a mystery story, an exploration of the meaning
of religion today and more widely takes a look at contemporary values
and racial tensions through the eyes of a pair of contrasting New Yorkers.
White is a college professor with a wide vocabulary and the world at
his feet. Black is an ex-con murderer who has caught Jesus in a big
way and is happy to live among down and outs, in some eyes wasting his
innate intelligence.
In a nice twist, we realise that what has thrown them together is White's
attempted suicide under the train that gives the "novel" its
title. His dive was inadvertently into the arms of his African-American
saviour.
There is an old theory bandied around in numerous literary works, quite
probably derived from ancient Native American folklore, that if you
save somebody's life, they become your responsibility. Black clearly
subscribes to this and spends the book's duration protecting, educating
and re-saving the man whom he had not met until their accidental collision
a couple hours before.
While in word count terms The Sunset Limited is closer to a
short story than a novel, Cormac McCarthy has put enough wise philosophy
into the mouths of his two characters to foment significant debate about
life in the 21st-century rat race, with his totally convincing creations
putting very different viewpoints, each of which will have its own subscribers.
This may not be the book that its publicists set out to sell but The
Sunset Limited should prove thought-provoking to any reader. Even
better, it deserves to be appreciated on the stage, so it is to be hoped
that a London producer will pick up the rights, if they have not already
done so.
Philip Fisher
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