It’s nice that Cormac McCarthy made it until the orca revolt, the recent boat attacks by killer whales off the Strait of Gibraltar. At least three ships have been sunk and many hobbled. McCarthy never would have written anything so schlocky in his fiction: His natural world may have been humbling—the closest thing to the divine found in his pages—yet it’s man who is the primary agent of violence in his fiction. But riotous whales do call to mind Melville, who cast a long shadow over McCarthy. Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s magnum opus, is arguably a Moby-Dick turned inside out. Three words, terse imperatives, open both novels: “Call me Ishmael”; “See the child.” And then one is plunged into an abyss of run-on sentences of compounding beauty. Of the two, McCarthy was the more exacting when it came to his prose. His writing is more tightly wound even when he’s letting his sentences and paragraphs unspool. Both novels, devoid of women (except for a few background prostitutes in Blood Meridian), tell of men hunting: a white whale in Melville’s book and Native Americans to scalp and kill in McCarthy’s.
