Words on a Page

‘Indianness’ is a central theme in Alexie’s work and race is a concern shared by all of his characters (with the exception, perhaps, of Robert Johnson in Reservation Blues ). The reader is never allowed to forget the race of the characters nor encouraged to identify with them simply as people. Skin, hair and eye-colour are frequently used as defining features. References to race are so frequent in Alexie’s stories that I carried out a brief survey, selecting forty pages at random, from four of his books – two novels, Reservation Blues (1995) and Flight (2007), and two collections of short stories - Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and The Toughest Indian in the World (2001). I counted all direct references to race (ie Indian, White, Black) including tribal affiliation (Lakota, Spokane, Flathead), blood quantum (half-blood, quarter-blood), and slang (breed, skins, redskins). I did not, though, include other Indian identifiers (braids, tipis, warriors, blue eyes)....

As a punctuation pedant, it always takes me a while to get into the swing of Cormac McCarthy novels, but I'm always glad when I can remove my teacherly hat and get sucked into the story. I found this one very moving, probably in part due to its stark simplicity. The relationship between the man and his son is beautifully portrayed and utterly tender. McCarthy is not a one-trick-pony; all of his books are different - always dark, but still always different. Which is possibly why the punctuation thing nags at me. I'm not sure why he's chosen to write this way. Yes, it represents a kind of bleakness, which he's famous for, but still it seems unnecessary. He does not need a gimmick like this to set himself apart from other writers. His stories do that for him. And it makes it really difficult to insist that my students use correct punctuation...

Published in 1968, Outer Dark , is McCarthy's second novel. The black and pessimistic view of human nature, McCarthy's trademark, is there, and themes which emerge in later books are touched upon. There are, however, some fairly rudimentary issues which kept me from being fully engaged with this book. For some reason McCarthy likes his characters to be as anonymous as possible, seldom referring to them by name. This, and the fact that he does not give us much in the way of physical description, made it very hard for me to picture Rinthy and Culla Holme and to care about them as people. Sure, we know that they live in the bleakest of circumstances (that’s pretty much a given for McCarthy’s characters) and that they are impoverished on all levels, but it is not until nearly half-way through the book that we learn the age of Rinthy. This matters. I do not necessarily need to know that Rinthy is nineteen years old, but it would have helped tremendously when trying to form an image ...

As can be said of all Cormac McCarthy novels, Blood Meridian is not for the faint-hearted. At its centre is 'the kid', a fourteen-year-old boy, sucked into a mercenary band of scalp hunters who rove the south-west frontier of 1849. As they drift from one bloody massacre to another, a hellish world unfolds. There is little plot in this novel - the action is, for the most part episodic - and the omniscient narrator remains detached to the point that we never get inside the heads of the characters. This makes them feel two-dimensional and cliché in their bloodlust and I know that I've seen them all before – the psychotic murderers, the crooked lawmen, the Indian accomplices dressed in ill-fitting morning coats – and because of the narrative distance, I learn nothing new about any of them. The narrator also has an amoral and objective tone: we are never asked to make judgments about or join in the depravity, but merely to be a witness. We do, however, get the sense early on th...

This is a link the Synergise website which has just published an article I wrote about a visit to Malindi, Kenya. If you would like to have a look, please click here .