The Joke God Didn't Laugh At

McCarthy was already seated when I arrived, which surprised me. He’d chosen a booth in the back corner of a bar in San Antonio that smelled like floor wax and decades of spilled beer, the kind of place where the lighting is amber not because anyone designed it that way but because half the bulbs are dead. He had a glass of water in front of him. No ice. He was watching the door with a stillness that made me feel, walking toward him, like I was crossing a much larger distance than I was.

Abercrombie arrived twelve minutes late, coat damp, carrying a pint he’d apparently ordered at the bar without stopping. He slid into the booth across from McCarthy, took a drink, and said, “Christ, it’s grim in here. Perfect.”

McCarthy said nothing.

“Right,” I said. “So. A fantasy war story. The combination we’ve been given is — well, it’s the two of you, essentially. Joe’s darkly comic approach to compromised characters meeting Cormac’s treatment of violence as something beyond morality. And structurally we’re looking at The Blade Itself and Blood Meridian.”

“A torturer you want to have a beer with,” Abercrombie said, “and a judge who dances naked in the firelight. Match made in heaven.”

“The judge does not dance,” McCarthy said. His voice was quiet, flat, the way a man speaks when volume has never been necessary. “He moves. And what he is doing is not for your entertainment.”

“Of course it’s for entertainment. Everything in a novel is for entertainment. Even the parts that make you want to throw the book across the room — especially those parts. The reader is being entertained by their own discomfort. That’s the contract.”

“There is no contract. The book exists. The reader exists. What happens between them is not a transaction.”

I watched this exchange like a man watching two weather systems approach each other from opposite horizons. Abercrombie leaned back, half-smiling, his body language loose and easy, a man accustomed to arguments he enjoys. McCarthy hadn’t moved. His hands were flat on the table, one on each side of his water glass, symmetrical, still.

“Let me try something,” I said. “The story we’re writing needs a war. Not a battle — a war. A long campaign. And at the center of it, a character who’s done terrible things and knows it. Someone who has been the instrument of violence and has developed — what? A relationship with that violence. Joe, for you, that relationship might look like humor. The character cracks jokes. Makes light of the blood on his hands because the alternative is madness. Cormac, for you—”

“The character does not make light of it,” McCarthy said. “The character understands that what he has done is what men do. Not aberration. Pattern. The joke is a way of pretending the pattern can be interrupted. It cannot.”

“Bollocks,” Abercrombie said, cheerfully. “The joke is how people survive the pattern. That’s not pretending. That’s coping. It’s the most human response there is. You put a man knee-deep in gore and he’ll crack a joke before he cries. Not because he doesn’t feel it. Because feeling it all at once would kill him.”

“And this matters?” McCarthy asked. “That he survives?”

The question landed like a stone in deep water. Abercrombie’s half-smile didn’t fade, exactly, but something behind it recalibrated.

“It matters to me,” he said, slower now. “Yeah. I want my characters to survive. Not necessarily literally — plenty of mine die, and die badly — but I want there to be something in them that is fighting to continue. Even the worst of them. Glokta is a torturer and a bastard and he’s also, on some level, a man trying to get through the day. The humor is the proof of life. Take it away and he’s just a monster, and monsters are boring.”

“Monsters are not boring,” McCarthy said. “Monsters are the most honest thing in any narrative. A man who does terrible things and feels nothing — who has no quip, no defense, no mechanism of distance — that man shows you what violence actually is. Not an experience to be processed. A condition.”

“A condition,” Abercrombie repeated.

“Of existence. Violence is not something that happens to the world. It is the world. Everything else — your humor, your coping, your survival — those are the decorations men hang on the cage.”

I took a drink of my beer, which was warm already. The bar’s ceiling fan was off, and the air had the thick, stagnant quality of a room that has given up trying to be comfortable. McCarthy’s water glass had not moved. I realized he hadn’t touched it since I arrived. It was not a prop. It was simply there.

“Here’s my problem,” I said. “Both of these positions are generative. Both produce extraordinary fiction. But this story needs to contain both. A register that treats violence as scripture — cosmic, unjudgeable, beyond human scale — and a register that knows the genre conventions being broken and finds the whole situation darkly, specifically funny. How do those coexist in the same narrative without one undermining the other?”

“They undermine each other,” Abercrombie said. “That’s the point. That’s where the energy comes from. You’ve got a character who’s trying to be wry about his situation, trying to maintain the internal monologue that says well, this is all a bit shit, isn’t it, and the world keeps refusing to cooperate. The landscape doesn’t care about his quips. The war doesn’t pause for his irony. He’s the funniest man in a universe that doesn’t understand humor, and that’s — that’s tragedy, actually. Not comedy. Tragedy dressed up in a joke.”

“Your character’s irony is a smaller thing than you think it is,” McCarthy said.

“I know that.”

“Do you? In your books the irony is the center. The reader laughs with the character, and the laughter is the primary experience. What I am suggesting is a narrative where the laughter is audible but distant. Like hearing someone laugh in another room while you are watching something you cannot look away from. The laughter does not comment on the violence. It exists alongside it. Parallel. Never intersecting.”

“Never intersecting.” Abercrombie frowned. “That’s two novels, then. You’re describing two novels that happen to share a binding.”

“I am describing one novel with two frequencies. Turn the dial and you hear one or the other. But both are always broadcasting.”

I leaned forward. “What does that look like on the page? Concretely. Because structurally — if we have a character who’s wry and self-aware, and we also have a narrative register that treats everything as liturgy, what is the reader actually experiencing paragraph by paragraph?”

Neither of them answered immediately. Abercrombie ran his thumb along the rim of his glass. McCarthy looked at a point somewhere past my left shoulder, focused on something that wasn’t in the room.

“The quest,” Abercrombie said eventually. “In The Blade Itself, the quest is a trap. Bayaz sends them on this journey and it looks like a fantasy adventure and then you realize the whole thing was political theater. The heroes were pawns. The quest narrative itself was the deception. So — give this character a war campaign that looks like it has a purpose. A siege to break, a tyrant to depose, a border to defend, something with shape and direction. And the character knows — or suspects, or gradually realizes — that the campaign is a mechanism. That he’s being used. The humor comes from that awareness. The awful comedy of going through the motions of a heroic story when you know the story is rigged.”

“And the violence?” I asked.

“The violence is real. That’s the thing. The quest might be theater, but the people dying aren’t. Every sword through a gut is actual. Every town burned is actual. The campaign is a lie, but the blood is not, and the gap between the fiction of the purpose and the reality of the killing — that’s where the darkness lives.”

“The violence is not where the darkness lives,” McCarthy said. It was the most words he’d spoken in sequence, and Abercrombie turned to look at him with an expression I couldn’t fully parse — wary, interested, something else. “The darkness lives in the fact that the violence requires no purpose. You are talking about a campaign that is a lie. I am talking about a campaign that does not need to be anything. The killing does not need the framework of deception to be terrible. It does not need the irony of a rigged quest. It is sufficient unto itself. A man puts his blade into another man and the other man dies and the landscape is unchanged and the sky does not darken and no god marks the passage. That is the condition. Your character’s discovery that the quest is rigged — that discovery is still a narrative of meaning. He learns something. He understands the shape of the deception. I am interested in the moment after understanding, when understanding is revealed to be worthless.”

The bar got quieter. I didn’t check if it was actually quieter or if it just felt that way.

“You want to take away his joke,” Abercrombie said.

“I want to show what the joke is standing on.”

“Which is nothing.”

“Which is nothing. Yes.”

Abercrombie drank. Wiped his mouth. Looked at me. “He’s right, the bastard. I know he’s right. The funniest thing about gallows humor is that the gallows doesn’t care. The whole point of making jokes in the dark is that the dark doesn’t respond. If the dark responded — if the universe acknowledged the comedy — it wouldn’t be funny anymore. It would just be banter.”

“So,” I said carefully, “the character’s humor is not ironic distance. It’s a sound he makes in a void.”

“Don’t say void,” Abercrombie said. “That’s exactly the kind of word that makes this pretentious. He’s not in a void. He’s in a field full of dead horses and mud and the rain won’t stop and his boots have holes and the man next to him has lost three fingers and keeps looking at his hand like he can’t quite believe the count, and in that context, our man says something that would be funny if anyone were in a state to laugh. Nobody laughs. He says it anyway. That’s the character.”

“And around this man,” McCarthy said, “the war continues. It did not begin for him and it will not end for him. It began before anyone present can remember and it will continue after everyone present is dead. The war is not an event. It is a landscape. And the men who move through it are features of that landscape, like trees or stones, and the violence is weather.”

“Weather,” I said.

“Something that happens. Not something that is done.”

“People do violence,” Abercrombie said. “Specific people. With specific reasons — bad reasons, stupid reasons, human reasons. Your cosmic violence is gorgeous on the page but it erases agency. My characters choose. They choose badly, they choose selfishly, they choose knowing they’ll regret it, but they choose. If you turn violence into weather, you let everyone off the hook.”

“No one is on any hook. That is the error. You want accountability because you are writing moral fiction. Fiction where actions have consequences and characters are judged, if not by God then by the reader, if not by the reader then by themselves. I am not writing moral fiction. I am writing the world as it is. Men kill. The land endures. Judgment is a story men tell to make the killing bearable.”

“And you think that’s more honest.”

“I think honesty is another story men tell.”

Abercrombie laughed — a short, genuine sound. “All right. You win that round.” He turned to me. “Here’s what I’ll give him. Our character — this wry, self-aware bastard who knows the war is a machine and he’s a cog in it — he should have a moment where the humor fails. Not where he stops being funny, but where the situation exceeds the capacity of wit. Where he reaches for the joke and it’s not there. And what’s left, when the joke fails, is not epiphany. Not understanding. Just — exposure. The landscape, as Cormac describes it. The war as weather. The character without his one defense.”

“And he comes back from that?” I asked.

“He makes another joke eventually. Of course he does. But the reader knows now what’s underneath. The reader has seen the ground.”

“The ground does not care that the reader has seen it,” McCarthy said.

“No. But the reader does.”

There was a pause. The television above the bar showed a baseball game with the sound off. Two men at the counter argued about something domestic — a fence, a property line. Normal human friction, a world away from what we were building.

“I want to ask about the journey,” I said. “Blood Meridian is a journey that strips away civilized pretensions. The kid starts as something recognizable — young, violent, but human-scaled — and by the end, the book has sanded down everything except the bare mechanics of survival and killing. The Blade Itself is also a journey, but with political machinations underneath — the fantasy adventure surface concealing the real game. If our story is a war campaign, a long march, what gets stripped away? And does the stripping-away reveal the political machinery or the cosmic emptiness?”

“Both,” Abercrombie said. “In sequence. First he discovers the machinery. The war is being run for someone’s benefit — not the soldiers’, not the people’s, some distant power using the campaign as a chess move. That’s the first layer of disillusionment. Classic stuff. Every soldier story has it. But then — underneath the machinery — there’s nothing. The machinery itself is contingent, arbitrary. The power that set the war in motion doesn’t have a grand design either. It’s machinery all the way down, and at the bottom, the machine is running on nothing.”

“On appetite,” McCarthy said. “Not nothing. Appetite. The war feeds on the men who feed it and the feeding is its own justification. This is what the judge teaches. War is the game. The game is played because it is the game. There need be no further accounting.”

“And our man,” I said, “the one with the jokes and the self-awareness — he’s walking through this campaign and losing layers. First the heroic narrative goes. Then the political explanation goes. And what’s left—”

“What’s left is a man walking,” McCarthy said. “In a landscape he did not make. Toward a destination he did not choose. Among the dead he did not mourn. And the walking is what there is.”

“With bad boots,” Abercrombie added. “Don’t forget the boots. The specificity matters. If you make this abstract — the cosmic walk through the moral void — it’s graduate school. If the man has blisters and the road is shit and the rations ran out two days ago, it’s a story.”

“Agreed,” McCarthy said. The single word, unqualified. Both of us looked at him, slightly startled. He lifted his water glass and drank for the first time.

“So we have something,” I said. “A war campaign that functions simultaneously as political machinery and cosmic condition. A protagonist who uses humor as defense until the defense fails. A journey that strips away first the heroic narrative, then the political narrative, and arrives at — what Cormac calls appetite, what Joe calls nothing, what might be the same thing described differently.”

“They are not the same thing,” McCarthy said.

“They might be,” Abercrombie said.

McCarthy looked at him for a long time. I could not read his expression. I am not sure expressions were what he traded in.

“The torturer in your book,” McCarthy said finally. “Glokta. He is likeable.”

“He’s compelling. People call him likeable. I’m never sure that’s the right word.”

“He is recognizable. The reader sees in him a person. This is your gift. You make the terrible familiar. You put the reader inside the man who turns the screws and the reader thinks: yes, I would also make that joke. I would also want the next meal. I would also find a way to continue.”

“Thank you,” Abercrombie said, and he meant it.

“And this is the limitation. Because the reader who recognizes himself in the torturer has been made comfortable. He has been given a way to sit with the violence that does not cost him anything. The joke is a cushion. I would like, in this story, for the cushion to be taken away.”

“For how long?”

“For long enough that the reader forgets it existed.”

Abercrombie stared at his nearly empty glass. He turned it slowly on the table, leaving a wet ring on the wood. Outside, it had started raining. You could hear it hitting the awning over the bar’s entrance, a flat irregular percussion that made the room feel smaller.

“That’s a hard sell,” he said quietly. “If you take the humor away entirely, even for a stretch, you change the contract with the reader. They came for the dark comedy. They came for the voice. If you go silent—”

“The silence will mean more because they remember the voice.”

“Or they’ll put the book down.”

“Some will.”

“You don’t care about that.”

“A book that everyone finishes has not gone far enough.”

Abercrombie looked at me. “He’s going to make this very difficult, you know. Whatever we build — whoever this character is — Cormac wants a section where the prose abandons the voice the reader has been relying on and becomes something else. Something that doesn’t wink. Something that just describes, the way his prose describes, without judgment or distance or comfort.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think that’s right. And I think it might be the best part of the story.”

“It might also be the part that breaks it.”

“Those are often the same part,” McCarthy said. He pushed his water glass two inches to the left, the first unnecessary movement he’d made all evening, and stood up. “I need to go. The rain will get worse.”

He left money on the table — too much for a glass of water, which is to say any money at all — and walked out without saying goodbye. The door closed behind him and the room felt both emptier and, somehow, more breathable.

Abercrombie watched him go. “Terrifying man,” he said, without apparent fear. “Absolutely right about half of it. Absolutely wrong about the other half. And I can’t tell you which half is which.”

“That’s the story,” I said.

“That’s the problem with the story.” He finished his pint. “Buy me another one and let’s talk about boots.”

I bought him another one. We talked about boots, and about supply lines, and about how long a man can march on bad food before his teeth start loosening, and about the specific color of mud in a camp where ten thousand men have been living for six weeks. We did not talk about the cosmic void or the nature of violence or whether humor redeems or merely distracts. We talked about boots. And I think that conversation — the one about boots — is where the story actually lives.

But I wouldn’t tell McCarthy that.