The Counsellor by Cormac McCarthy

I only remembered when I was about halfway through reading this slight screenplay of a 2013 film that basically no one has ever seen (because the critics who saw it said it was shit) that Cormac McCarthy was posthumously and almost certainly accurately accused of sexual misconduct last year, so I probably shouldn’t have been reading this at all…

By that point, though, I’d read beyond the mid-point, and also it’s short, and also my baby was lightly napping on my lap and I didn’t want to disturb it and this was the book I had in my dry, wintry hands, so I carried on to the end, anyway…

Despite there really not being much worthwhile in the book.

Yes, it’s famously not a great film, and seemed – for a long time – like it was going to be McCarthy’s last published text, until the surprise (for me and many others though maybe not people in the know!) 2022 double publication of The Passenger and Stella Maris, which I enjoyed both of (though not as much as I enjoyed Nora Ephron’s Heartburn) while making my last-big-travel-adventure-pre-parenthood seven night trip to Cyprus–Riyadh–New Delhi-Varanasi-Mumbai in late 2023. Simpler times.

I think the literary legacy of McCarthy very much needed those books, as The Counsellor was no way to end a career of being (elsewhere) good at writing.

This screenplay is muddled, boring and ultimately quite sleazy, though I don’t know if that is more apparent slash stands out more given the uncomfortable stories about the writer that came out in 2024…

There’s dialogue here that describes a woman performing the splits naked on the windscreen of a car while masturbating (afterwards: “I asked her if she’d ever done that before and she said she’d done everything before”), there is one character who is mentioned as being “very attractive” in multiple stage directions, the phrase “luscious pussy” is used, and the “twist” at the end seems entirely reliant on an audience being audaciously surprised that a woman could be a criminal mastermind with knowledge about computers. …

Women in The Counsellor are sexy and obsessed with sex and money. Men are slightly less sexy and obsessed with sex and violence and money. There is lots of beheading, there’s lots about snuff videos (never described as being displayed on screen, but talked about in dialogue, which in a screenplay amounts to the same thing), and there’s a simple thrillery plot about mistaken identity in a risky drug smuggling investment that leads to all of the main characters being hunted and killed by a Mexican cartel, except for one of them who – ah! – has outwitted everyone else..!

It feels like the plot could have tightened up into something good – or at least entertaining – and it also feels like, in the hands of a seasoned and acclaimed director – Ridley Scott – and a proper Hollywood A lister cast (Cruz! Diaz! Pitt! Bardem! Fassbender!) – a schlocky, violent, thriller about a corrupt public defender who co-owns a nightclub with a guy who keeps pet cheetahs getting into drug-running and immediately losing is a recipe for simple movie success… It wasn’t, it isn’t, it didn’t all come together…

Flimsy characterisation, motiveless actions – so much risk being taken without any meaningful understanding or evocation of the value of the riches being chased – and a bizarre speech from a jeweller who’s in a single scene near the start that offers a sociocultural spiritual critique of the entire Western world… It all just feels amateurish, and something a long way from finished and ready to be filmed by a major director…

The only moments, really, when the text shines is the two or three times when there are lengthy passages of directions / descriptions, for it is these moments when McCarthy’s mastery of blunt staccato prose, suddenly, hits a reader in whatever part of the brain it is that visualises. He is someone who can do that, and do it very well. What he can’t do – or, at least, couldn’t do at this point in his career – is write ~180 pages of bracing and engaging dialogue.

So, alas, no… It’s not great. It’s also definitely not worth the ethical slip of reading a book by someone who has been exposed in the way this writer has…

Yes, McCarthy was responsible for some incredibly powerful and important novels of the past few decades, but he was also someone who almost certainly groomed and exploited a vulnerable teenager through into her adulthood, writing fictionalised versions of her difficult youth well into her middle age…

This is a bad book! And McCarthy definitely is someone whose actions have tarnished his writing.

So, even if you are willing to ignore the taboo of avoiding art by those you wouldn’t be comfortable sharing a dinner table with, the literary pleasures to be found here do not outweigh any sense of shame.

Not worth reading, alas…