Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

 

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• The Blurb...

Through the hostile landscape of the Texas–Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept up in the relentless tide of blood.

A group known as the Glanton gang hunt Indigenous Americans, collecting scalps as their bloody trophies. At the centre of this violence stands Judge Holden: a massive, hairless man, mysterious if not supernatural, erudite and cold-blooded. He is singularly extreme in his sadistic violence.

But the apparent chaos is not without order – the Glanton gang, too, are stalked as prey.

Read as both a brilliant subversion of the Western novel and a blazing example of that form, it is a powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful novel – and one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century.

• Our Review...

Well then, where to begin with this one. There is a lot to unpack

Not a great commercial success on its release, it has matured over the years to become the great Cormac McCarthy's magnum opus. Some have claimed it to be the mythical great American novel by the greatest American author. 

It's tale is a simple one if you refuse to see the huge philosophical and moral debate that McCarthy is showing between the actual lines of text. On it's surface a young lad known, as the kid, runs away from Tennessee and after some bloody encounters ends up riding with the infamous Glanton gang of scalphunters. Hired by the local authorities to inflict genocide on the local indigenous population. The narrative follows their adventures. 

Seems all relatively nice and quite, if not cosy then not unusual. It could be taken for a plot of a John Wayne film back in the day. 

However it is not. It is ultra violent and blood drenched. Yet somehow this isn't the most disturbing part. The mood or tone throughout the book is one of unrelenting doom and misery. There is just no hope or redemption. It fills you with dread for the future of the human race. I have also read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This too had the same underlying melancholy on steroids that can throw your soul off kilter.

The one redeeming feature is that the author does it superbly well.  He places the horror next to the everyday so that as if by osmosis they blend. The horrific becomes everyday and everyday becomes horrific. McCarthy does this also in the road. It takes a certain sort of talent to make you fear for your moral conscious.

This is not an easy book to read, in fact it is very challenging. The language is archaic, and in addition it is heavily laden with 1800s cowboy jargon. Even if you are reading on a kindle and you try to look up every weird, new word you are batting on a sticky wicket. Most of them are not even in the Oxford English dictionary. McCarthy has a very loose and quite frankly ridiculous relationship with punctuation. He just doesn't do punctuation, especially quotations marks. You find yourself thinking now did he actually say that or was he just thinking it?

Which brings me to another point. The beauty of writing over TV is that writing lends itself to exploring thoughts and internal emotions of our cast. McCarthy throws away this most versatile of the writers tools and just describes the action. All 3rd person, no 1st person. It's akin to willfully only using the first two gears in your car. The engine may be screaming to slip into third and fourth gears but McCarthy refuses.

The distance between the start of a McCarthy sentence and the end is vast. See the first of our selected quotes. You could get lost and lose the will to live in one of his sentences. Often the word "and" is used ad infinitum to extend the sentence. I have seen it advocated that he uses this method to resemble a more old testament type narrative. It works. One up side of his style is numerous metaphors and similes, which I really enjoy.

So all in all its a challenge to read this book. It's not easy. I resorted to a childhood tactic of reading out loud to myself so as not to get lost in the lines. You can't just pick this book up and read it. It is not user friendly. You need to put the concentration in. It is a mode of reading which becomes slightly easier the more times you slip into it. After reading this I immediately started reading a Stephen King novel. It felt like returning a shopping trolley with the busted wheel and then picking up the greased up proper four wheeled one. Lot easier to drive but definitely not so challenging.

All this before we even get to the characters.

The main character is Judge Holden. He is a behemoth at the centre of this book, similar to Capt Ahab in Moby Dick. 

He is polyglot, renaissance man skilled in music, philosophy and science. Sounds like a top guy? No he is bloodthirsty, paedophile with a love of war. He just appears one day out of the desert. He may even be the devil personified. He is a huge man with no hair at all. He is 25 stone but is nimble and quick. A sort of cross between Buster Bloodvessel the lead singer from Bad Manners and Hannibal Lector. His fireside musings on the purpose of life are by far the most fascinating part of this book. 

So is the hype of this book worth it? A bit of both really. At times I felt like the actual themes being discussed were a brilliant read but all the smoke and mirrors of the archaic style, jargon and lack of punctuation felt a bit like the emperors new clothes. 

One last thing. I hope McCarthy's view of human nature is wrong. I hope we are not dark and doomed. I hope that there is hope. 

This is a fascinating must read book for any bibliophile, I just don't know if you'll "enjoy" it. It is disturbing in its darkness. It is not easily forgotten.

• Selected Lines...

They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn- broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.

The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black. The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other way? he said.

Is that why war endures? No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them.

He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

......War is God

The judge smiled. Might does not make right, said Irving. The man that wins in some combat is not vindicated morally. Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.

• If You Like This Then You May Like...

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

American Psycho by Bret Eason Ellis

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

• About The Author...

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He later went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a travelling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark. In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press. In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing, was published with the third volume, Cities of the Plain, following in 1998. McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men, was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was published in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize.
(from Amazon.com)