STYLES of Writing SOUNDS & Silence
I have always read a wide variety of
material, generally with little discrimination. I was as happy with David
McCullough’s histories as with Colleen McCullough’s historical fiction. I
eagerly read Charles Dickens and J. K. Rowling. Margaret Atwood and John
Lescroart both kept me on tenterhooks.
Now that I, too, write,
I am no more choosy about my reading, but I am more analytical. This summer I
went from Patrick O’Brian’s Master and
Commander, a naval novel set in the early 1800’s. To a repeat reading of
Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World,
Volume One of his epic fantasy The Wheel
of Time. To Cormack McCarthy’s All
the Pretty Horses, the first in his Borderland
Trilogy. Three very different ways to present sound and silence.
From O’Brian this
excerpt:
‘Why
does he not fire?’ thought Jack. The Desaix’s
bow-chasers had been silent these twenty minutes. Indeed, by now she was in
musket-shot, and the people in her bows could easily be told from one another:
seamen, marines, officers—one man had a wooden leg. ‘By God, he’s going to
riddle us with grape.’
…the Desaix began to yaw. She
answered her helm as quickly as a cutter, and in three heartbeats there were
her thirty-seven guns coming round to bear. The broadside’s roar and the fall
of the Sophie’s main top gallant mast
and fore topsail yard came almost together—in the thunder a hail of blocks, odd
lengths of rope, splinters, the tremendous clang of a grape-shot striking the Sophie’s bell; and then a silence.
And from Jordan:
The
back door creaked as someone outside, or something, tried to push it open. His
mouth went dry. A crash shook the door in its frame and lent him speed; he
slipped through the window like a hare going to ground, and cowered against the
side of the house. Inside the room, wood splintered like thunder.
At
first when the trees surrounded him, he took comfort from them. They helped
hide him from Whatever the creatures were that had attacked the farm. As he
crept through the woods, though, moon shadows shifted, and it began to seem as
if the darkness of the forest changed and moved, too. Trees loomed
malevolently; branches writhed toward him. He could almost hear the growling
chuckles stifled in their throats while they waited for him. The howls of Tam’s
pursuers no longer filled the night, but in the silence that replaced them he
flinched every time the wind scraped one limb against another. He hardly dared to breathe for fear he might be
heard.
Then I read McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.
Rawlins
stood in the door of the kitchen and studied him.
You look like you been rode hard and put up wet, he said.
They sat at the table and ate. Rawlins leaned back and fished his tobacco out
of his shirtpocket.
I
keep waitin for you to unload your wagon, he said. I got to go to work here in
a few minutes.
I
just come up to see you.
What
about.
It
don’t have to be about something does it?
No.
Dont have to. He popped a match on the underside of the table and lit his
cigarette and shook out the match and put it in his plate.
I
hope you know what you’re doin, he said.
John
Grady drained the last of his coffee and put the cup on his plate along with
the silver. He got his hat from the bench beside him and put it on and stood up
to take his dishes to the sink.
Rawlins
watched him go to the sink and watched him go to the door. He thought he might
turn and say something else but he didn’t.
It was not the absence
of an apostrophe here and there that most affected me about McCarthy’s work. Having
just read O’Brian’s decorous and abundant language describing sea battles in
the Napoleonic Wars with their hundreds of men crowded on ships amid smoke and
thunderous cannon fire, I then read Jordan’s graphic descriptions of combat
with fantastical, ravening creatures in a world where silence and darkness battered
me as harshly as the sounds of raging battles.
And finally I read McCarthy,
with whom I was unfamiliar. My reaction to the change in styles was sensory. I
felt as if I had been struck partially deaf. He wrote a world where sounds and
people are as spare and sparse as the nearly barren dry lands of the West
Texas-Mexico borderlands. McCarthy led me through hot, open country, with few
people and them slow to speak their few words. A country of far distances and vast
silences.
Three very different
writers using words printed on paper to build worlds of sounds and silences in
my head.
