McCarthy v Child: a Quils Roadtest

Ever since Professor Sushing was sslllooooorrrssccchhhhhhed through the engine of his private jet, a fanatical team of English Lit PhDs has been working around the clock to develop his method of literary spectroscopy, a method they have now christened Quils to make it less of a mouthful and easier to type.

Here we have the world’s very first reductionist comparison of two popular novels by means of the Quils method. 

One Shot is a story by Lee Child (James Grant), in which a violent indestructible maverick, Jack Reacher, is embroiled in complicated acts of criminality. 

No Country for Old Men is a story by Cormac McCarthy, in which a violent indestructible maverick, Anton Chigurh, is embroiled in complicated acts of criminality.

Leaving aside the obvious differences in their subject matter, how do the books compare in terms of the styles in which they are written?

Don’t forget—where scores are given, they simply represent the extent to which an element of style appears in the book. 9 means it is everywhere: 0 means it is absent.

Action Beats in Dialogue. Lee 1/9. Cormac 1/9. 

Neither of our gritty authors has any truck with the modern pre-occupation with action beats in dialogue. You will not find Jack or Anton sipping a chardonnay mid-sentence. The few actions that are inserted in the dialogue are confined to conversational gestures—nods and shakes of the head, and so on.

Clichéd phrases. Lee 3/9. Cormac 2/9.

Both boys are happy to throw in a clichéd phrase here and there. Most of the familiar phrases occur in dialogue, which is the right place for them.

Dialogue tags. Lee 1/9. Cormac 1/9.

Dialogue tags are used sparingly in both books. Each author writes long passages of ‘talking heads’ dialogue in which the characters participate without being the subject of any pesky verbs. In both books, more than 99% of the dialogue tags use the verbs said or asked. There are extremely few instances of words such as shouted, screamed, spoke, and so on.  There are three ‘sighed’s in Lee’s book, but none in Cormac’s—very suggestive to us experts.

Dialogue.

Both authors write long passages of unrelieved dialogue consisting mainly of very short sentences. Lee’s dialogue is matter of fact and transactional, with the occasional long expositional speech in which Jack explains aspects of the plot to characters less smart than he. Cormac’s dialogue exposes the individual nature of his characters through the inclusion of homely or philosophical musings and is written to suggest their Texan accents.

Emotion in narrative. Lee 1/9. Cormac 1/9.

There is very little explicit mention of emotion in either narrative, with the notable exception that Jack Reacher is occasionally annoyed in various ways. 

Facts. Lee 5/9. Cormac 3/9.

Both authors perpetuate the thriller writer’s fetish with detailed factual information about guns, ammo, car engines, army policy, crime statistics in San Antonio and so on. Lee outfacts Cormac somewhat.

Fragments. Lee 9/9. Cormac 4/9.

The sentence fragment is everywhere in Lee’s work, appearing several times per page on average. They are of all sorts: without verbs or subjects or objects or combinations thereof. Cormac is also a fan of the fragment, but uses them more sparingly in the narrative.

Humour.  Lee 1/9. Cormac 1/9.

In Lee’s work there is some incidental humour in the form of ironic observations by the narrator or main character. In Cormac’s book, the characters alone indulge in ironic observations.

Metafictional techniques. Lee 0/9. Cormac 0/9.

Both books are written straightforwardly, without any of the cheap metafictional gimmickry which hallmarks the author with insufficient ideas to populate a book conventionally.

Metaphor. Lee 1/9. Cormac 3/9.

Metaphoric language is not Lee’s style. His narrative is straightforward, largely dispassionate and unambiguous. Cormac is equally straightforward in the main, but relieves the matter-of-fact delivery with the occasional stylish metaphor.

Null statements. Lee 9/9. Cormac 1/9.

A standout element of Lee’s style is the use of null statements—sentences which describe what doesn’t happen rather than what does. The notorious example is ‘Reacher said nothing’, which occurs sixty-one times in One Shot. Jack, however, does not have a monopoly on oral inactivity; between them, the other characters say nothing eighty-four times. As well as saying nothing, the characters are skilled at not performing a limited range of other simple physical activities, such as responding, moving etc.

Cormac uses null statements sparingly. He uses the word ‘nothing’ by itself as a sentence fragment to denote the absence of something sought or expected by a character. In dialogue, he uses sentences of the form ‘x didn’t answer’ perhaps twenty times.

Pace.

Both books are often summarised as ‘fast paced’, but that’s an inaccurate and lazy simplification. Lee’s opening chapter, for example, has a very slow pace, mainly consisting of detailed descriptions of a downtown area through which a character moves in a traffic jam.

Slowing the pace to a crawl before moments of crisis is a classic Childism. The central character is forever becoming embroiled in brawls with brainless thugs. The fighting actions are often few and swiftly over, but they are heavily diluted by interposed observations by the narrator or central character on the art of fighting or the foolishness of the combatants.

Short snappy dialogue and sentence fragments tend to increase the pace in both books, but the effect is offset by a variety of elements that slow it. These include for example, very detailed descriptions, incidental musings, plondering, sermonising, expositional speeches and routine details such as ordering food, drinking coffee, getting in and out of elevators and so on.

For those who take a professional interest in such matters, ‘sudden’ or ‘suddenly’ appear not in Cormac’s narrative and fifteen times in Lee’s. Sentences starting with ‘Then’ are everywhere in both books.

Pleonasm. Lee 9/9. Cormac 3/9.

Most pages in Lee’s work have at least one pleonasm. Mainly these are the sort found in everyday speech, so their effect is to give the narrative a less formal tone, rather than appearing clumsy. Cormac is slightly tidier.

Plondering. Lee 3/9. Cormac 2/9. 

Plondering is that activity performed mainly in genre fiction in which characters or the narrator wonder about the plot. Lee’s book has a high plondering content, mainly in the form of dialogue, but partly through the implied thoughts of the main character. Cormac’s has somewhat less.

Polysyndeton.  Lee 2/9. Cormac 9/9.

Polysyndeton to Cormac is as the sentence fragment to Lee: his default narrative device. A typical half page will find a he (for there are few shes in Cormac’s book) performing a handful of actions chained by ands. Lee indulges less frequently and with fewer ands per instance on average. If intricate syntax is an essential ingredient in your preferred reading, you won’t enjoy either of these books.

Punctuation peculiarities. Lee 5/9. Cormac 9/9.

Neither author uses semicolons, em dashes, ellipses or exclamation marks. Cormac eschews speech marks and apostrophes, and is lax in capitalising certain terms. 

Repetition. Lee 9/9. Cormac 2/9.

Figures of speech involving repetition are a frequent throughout Lee’s book. An outlying example is the occurrence of the words ‘showed him’ eleven times in a single paragraph.

Routine details. Lee 3/9. Cormac 3/9.

A significant chunk of the wordcount in each book is devoted to routine activities performed by the characters, such as ordering and consuming food and coffee. Surprisingly to this reviewer, Cormac’s book contained almost as many references to coffee as Lee’s. 

Sensationalism. Lee 6/9. Cormac 9/9.

The plots of the books are driven by explicit violence and the threat of it, with around a dozen murders in each. Violence is foregrounded more frequently in Cormac’s books; in Lee’s it tends to be kept for a handful of set-pieces.

Sermonising. Lee 2/9. Cormac 6/9.

Cormac is considerably more preachy than Lee, devoting page after page to the opinions of one or other character about a miscellany of topics, which you might find profound insights into the meaning and purpose of life or equivocal nonsense, depending on your outlook. Indeed, a significant difference of emphasis between the two authors is that the observations of Cormac’s characters tend to be about life in general, while those of Lee’s are more narrowly concerned with subjects related to the plot.

Scenery and props. Lee 9/9. Cormac 7/9.

Lee provides lengthy descriptions of settings and objects, a classic being the page he devotes to telling us about a baddie’s rifle, or the paragraph on the soles of the baddie’s shoes. His descriptions are occasionally overcomplete. 

Cormac also revels in description. He tends to focus upon the natural scenery, rather than the manmade. Where Lee will happily devote a paragraph to the chevrons painted on the highway, Cormac will tell you instead about the landscape through which the road runs. Cormac is just as content as Lee to pile-on technical detail. When a character ‘glasses’ the landscape, we are told that his binoculars are german (sic) with twelve power magnification. His gun is a heavy-barrelled .270 on a ’98 Mauser action, whatever that means, with an Unertl scope of the same power as the binos. 

Both authors are utterly inconsistent with their treatment of technical detail. While Cormac tells us that the trigger of a character’s gun is set to a nine-ounce pressure, he leaves us completely in the dark about the same character’s other gadgets. Take his cutlery, for instance. Was it stainless steel, bone handled, silver plated? Were the forks of the three- or four-tine variety? Was it heavy bladed, with a twelve-ounce standard cutting pressure? The poor reader is left floundering in doubt.

Tone.

Lee’s narrative tone of voice is mainly dry and expressionless (as indeed is the tone of his characters), with the occasional touch of irony. Cormac’s is similar but lacks the wise guy overtones that creep into Lee’s from time to time.

Vocabulary.

Neither Lee nor Cormac gets up to any fancy author tricks with vocabulary, using workaday words throughout the two books. The very few exceptions include a couple of McCarthy favourites—carom and lope—which he uses figuratively.

Conclusion.

Five minutes searching on Google shows that the two books have received distinctly different critical receptions, with one praised for its literary qualities and the other not.

Close reading shows the books to have much in common in style and content, and Lee’s style to be as distinctive as Cormac’s (in these books, at least).

The puzzled researchers at Quils HQ have been forced to conclude that praiseworthy literary quality consists of the heavy-handed use of the word ‘and’, writing dialogue with accents, a metaphor every five pages or so, unconventional punctuation and dollops of sermonising. Heavens!