The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy Picador, HK$104
The Sunset Limited is a paperback, it's fiction, but it's not a novel. Instead, the cover proclaims it 'A Novel in Dramatic Form'. HBO has just screened an adaptation starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. Quite how this distinguishes it from a humble play or film script beats me: I suspect sales have something to do with it. So, how does reading The Sunset Limited compare to, say, The Road? Here's the set-up. Two men enter a 'tenement building in a black ghetto'. One of the characters is 'Black', the other 'White'. The names describe their skin colour and also indicate general points of view: Black, ironically, is optimistic, White something of a nihilist. 'Everything that happens doesn't mean something else,' he says, only to have the play disprove him. The pair talk, in unpunctuated McCarthyite fashion, interrupted only by some terse stage directions. They debate life, love, religion and death. Black shares his own past: imprisoned for murder, he later found God. White doesn't have time for such faith. It is starkly powerful, but humourless and unremittingly bleak even by McCarthy's standards. Don't save for a rainy day.