No modern novelist was as utterly wedded to the apocalyptic sublime as Cormac McCarthy, who has died aged 89 at his home in New Mexico. Throughout a career in fiction that generated 12 novels and two plays and spawned a number of excellent film adaptations, McCarthy’s muse was always the abyss. He wrote about the darkness, violence, horror and chaos he perceived at the core of all creation – not with the hysterical terror of HP Lovecraft, but with an ecstatic lyricism more like that of Muslim mystic-poets rapturously praising their holy-beloved.
Beginning with The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965 when McCarthy was in his early 30s, and concluding with the late-career diptych of novels The Passenger and Stella Maris that materialised last year after a 15-year break, McCarthy’s fiction was animated by an unrelenting pessimism regarding human nature and our place in the cosmos that puts his work violently at odds with the progressivist optimism that has become orthodoxy to contemporary literary culture. A deranged utterance from his most unforgettable creation, the Luciferian Judge Holden in Blood Meridian – “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” – has become a meme-slogan of the internet age, signifier of the ancient ecstatics of excess, carnage and madness, the lust for mayhem and atrocity that persists in the foundations of rationalist enterprise and the bright town squares of the online.
