A Southern Parable

OUTER DARK, by Cormac McCarthy. 242 pages. Random House. $4.95.

Cormac McCarthy is one of those few writers who go on from a well-remarked first novel to write a superior second book. His first. The Orchard Keeper, won him the William Faulkner Foundation Award for 1965, a traveling scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant. His new work shows that the 35-year-old author from the backwoods of Tennessee, while still echoing the style of Faulkner, has developed into an exceptional talent on his own.

Outer Dark is a morality tale that has elements of a Southern-Gothic horror story. Its main characters are involved in a quest. A newborn child, the product of an incestuous affair between a backwoods brother and sister, is abandoned by the brother and found by a passing tinker. The sister sets out on a long search for the child, and the brother obsessively pursues her, while both suffer physical and spiritual deprivations.

Three archetypal murderers crisscross their dual pilgrimages, bent on savagely having waste the inhabitants of the primitive countryside. Irrational and unexplained, the murderers rise up like dream figures, as relentlessly hounding as the Furies. The country people become a Greek chorus, polarized between suspicion and curiosity, innate generosity and indifferent cruelty. McCarthy captures the intimate tonalities of their simple speech:

Listen, what all's happent? said the clerk.

I don't know. Somebody has dug up a hunch of graves at the church.

Grave thiefs, another whispered.

They Lord have mercy.

McCarthy's re-creation of the local dialect is surpassed by his poetic descriptions of the land and its people. His is an Irish singing voice imbued with Southern Biblical intonations. The result is an antiphony of speech and verse played against a landscape of penance. And, finely controlied as it is, his simple narrative with its suspenseful qualities becomes a profound parable that ultimately speaks to any society in any time.

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