Elberry puzzles over a ‘novel in dramatic form’ from the author of No Country for Old Men and The Road…

Here is a puzzling thing. McCarthy, who is generally known for harrowing tales of bloodshed and mutilation, has written a play starring a ex-crim and a suicidal professor, sitting at a table debating the meaning of life. There are no fireside decapitations. There are no mutilations. There is no genocide. There isn’t even any wounding. There are just two characters, referred to as White and Black throughout, since the professor is white and the ex-crim black.

White has lost faith in everything, including Western civilisation, and therefore tried to jump into the path of a train. Black pulled White back and somehow they end up in Black’s flat. Then they talk. Black talks a lot of Jesus talk and White talks about how Western civilisation went up in the chimneys of Dachau.

Black is on the side of life, brotherhood, and Jesus; White is a nihilist, an educated, middle-aged suicidal nihilist. It’s not as crude as Jesus versus Dachau, though: Black believes in god, and assumes this god is Jesus Christ, but the immediacy of his belief swallows up the particularity of creed; and White doesn’t debate so much as cling stubbornly to his own lack of belief, in anything. Throughout, Black tries to keep White from rushing off to kill himself. He argues, he sympathises, he tells his own jailhouse shiv stories. There isn’t much in the way of argument or debate: it’s rather a meandering conversation, generated by two irreconcilably opposed perspectives.

On a first reading it falls far short of Blood Meridian or even the weaker No Country for Old Men. Yet it is by no means bad. At times it recalls Beckett, especially in the stark close; and the argument follows Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, up to a point. It is all recast into McCarthy’s particular, grimly humorous manner. So Black relates his first encounter with God, a voice coming to him after he nearly beats a fellow prisoner to death:

Black: If he didnt know I was