Films and books have different qualities and different purposes. Sometimes however, with certain authors, books can compete with films on the same terms. Cormac McCarthy’s style, for example, can be described as cinematic. There is a passage in chapter 4 of “Blood Meridian” which is quite simply breathtaking. It describes a massacre. It is filmic in the way it portrays the event from the victims’ point of view. It starts with what in a film would be called a long shot:- “The following day on the skyline to the south they saw clouds of dust that lay across the earth for miles.” The troop of soldiers watch a herd of cattle and horses approach, unconcerned. You can imagine the film soundtrack as the herd speeds up and becomes noisier, a little more threatening:- “The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed company” There then follows what I can only describe as the most astounding sentence I have ever read. It is about 250 words long. The sentence doesn’t just describe the Indian charge but replicates it. The words themselves stampede forward. As a reader you hold your breath and feel the horror of the transfixed victims:- “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of former owners ….. one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil …. all howling in a barborous tongue and riding down on them like a horde from hell”. The camera is now in amongst the riders. Suddenly we get a close-up of the sergeant’s face, represented by one short sentence, as he realises his fate:- “Oh my god, said the sergeant.” 6 words. It’s as if the 250 word charge has come to a juddering stop. 6 words that seem as powerless as the soldiers facing the horde of riders. A great example of style matching content.

The whole two-page “tour de force” reminds me of the beach scene in Jaws, when the shark attacks. Here also the threat builds slowly through the use of the famous soundtrack, from long shot of the beach, through closer shots of the swimmers to the close-up of the police chief’s face as he realises the seriousness of the danger. The same psychological impact is achieved in both book and film. In Jaws the technique used is the dolly zoom shot, in which the camera moves in at a speed synchronised with the lens zooming out. The result is that the background telescopes away from the camera and the effect suggests the sudden psychological disorientation of the subject. In the book, the sudden short sentence zooms in on the victim’s face in a similar way. Those six words are in effect a literary dolly zoom shot. Even before the Indians reach their victims, McCarthy’s book has generated as much tension and drama as any film.