2008-04-02 Modern American literature. Accomplished but hard to love

If you pick up this book because you loved the Coen brothers' film, then you will either adore it or loathe it. I'm torn between the two. 'No Country' is a mix of blunt-force trauma and philosophical debate. It's a study of how brutal, awful violence has pervaded American society, and how it blights the lives of the very ordinary people it touches. If you've seen the film then you'll know the plot and be familiar with the main characters -- all were faithfully drawn from the novel, although you get a deeper understanding of their back story and motivation in the book than you do in the film.

However, much as I love the plot, philosophy and characterisation, McCarthy's use of language drives me insane. He abandons large chunks of punctuation to capture, I assume, the speech patterns of the region. But attemping to read an entire novel written without speech marks in patois is extremely trying. It disrupted the whole flow of the text for me. I could just about manage the didnt couldnt wouldnt, but trying to understand whether a line was speech or not nearly ruined the book entirely. If you can cope with an entire novel written in text-message English then you'll be fine. But if I had not known the plot, and grit my teeth and determined to see it through, then I would have stopped reading after the first couple of chapters.
So it's left me feeling very wary of picking up any more books by Cormac McCarthy. Perhaps I'm just not cut out for modern American literature...
Either 1/10 or 9/10.