LITERATURE: Child of God – Mood

Lord, this is McCarthy:

I remember back a number of years, talkin about fairs, they had a old boy come through would shoot live pigeons with ye.  Him with a rifle and you with a shotgun.  Or anything else.  He must of had a truckload of pigeons.  Had a boy out in the middle of a field with a crateful and he’d holler and the boy’d let one slip and he’d raise his rifle and blam, he’d dust it.  Misters, he could strictly make the feathers fly.  We’d never seen the like of shootin.  They was a bunch of us pretty hotshot birdhunters lost our money out there fore we got it figured out.  What he was doin, this boy was loadin the old pigeons up the ass with them little firecrackers.  They’d take off like they was home free and get up about so high and blam, it’d blow their asses out.  He’d just shoot directly he seen the feathers fly.  You couldn’t tell.  (p. 58)

This is in the first person pov of a narrator–we don’t know who–who has known Lester Ballard since he was a kid.  Every now and then these intimacies of knowledge are shared with the reader within the third person pov of another narrator (different voice) and lends a sense of personal involvement to the story, even though we do not know who the narrator is, his relationship to Lester, or the time element involved.  It serves the purpose as do personal interviews with family, friends and neighbors amid a documentary drama about a serial killer of making the character more real.  After all, this guy knows a lot about Lester, and we’re just following Lester around trying to learn him on our own so the help is appreciated.  Exquisite technique, and not overdone by McCarthy; in his usual manner, the changeover is not obviously pointed out by font (as in Faulkner) nor precisely by chapter division.  The chapters, or segments of the story are brief, often only a page or two, and do not alternate evenly between the two narrators.  It’s wonderfully done.

McCarthy seems to spring an audacious act on the reader, and also is very blunt with the sexuality of his characters and their behavior.  But it still tends to surprise, and delight the reader.