Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian was Cormac McCarthy’s fifth book and is generally considered to be his masterpiece.
The novel is set primarily in the borderlands between Texas and Mexico during the years of the California gold rush. Its anti-hero, and sometimes subject, is known to the reader only as “the kid” and he’s about as unlikeable as everyone else you’ll meet - including the filibustering U.S. Army Captain White, earless misanthrope Toadvine, ruthless gang leader John Glanton, and the pale, otherworldly, warrior poet, Judge Holden.
The kid and his compatriots spend most of the novel traversing the brutal, desolate hellscapes of the Southwest massacring Mexicans, Indians, and innocent townsfolk while drunkenly trashing any vestiges of civilized life on their way to collecting scalps for bounty. Consequently, any scalps will do - women, children, men, boys, Mexicans, Americans, Indians, whatever.
Along the way, McCarthy relates their encounters in a hypnotic, sometimes perplexing narrative style peppered with archaic words and phrases, Spanish dialogue, and an utter lack of quotation marks, commas, apostrophes, or anything resembling modern grammatical sentence structure.
Now admittedly I’m not a student of literature. Sure, I’ve dabbled in Dostoyevsky, O’Conner, Woolf, Dickens, etc. I’ve even read and immensely enjoyed McCarthy’s The Road. But I’ve never tackled Moby Dick, nor set out to read Ulysses or War and Peace. That being said, I feel like I’m a pretty smart person. And yet, I have to admit I struggled with much of the material here.
This is a novel where the rape and murder of countless innocents are often followed by fireside soliloquies such as:
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
I understand and appreciate the point of the above passages - shit happens - and all your civilized moral clarity is merely a survival instinct to try and make sense of the chaos. It’s a philosophy of violent nihilism, and it speaks to why the Judge and Glanton can be comfortable doing what they do. But these passages often run on for pages and pages.
Not to say there aren’t also passages of incredible beauty and power (there are), but oftentimes sentences run on and on endlessly in a breathless style akin to Jack Kerouac’s notorious On The Road scroll. To wit:
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 prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
That’s one sentence. It conjures some fierce imagery, but it also often feels like a bit of showmanship.
Anyway, I didn’t dislike the book. In fact, I rather enjoyed much of it.
The Judge is one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered and the novel’s final pages have a sort of chaotic, headlong, violent momentum that envelops you in classic can’t-put-it-down fashion. But to grapple with the book, you have to be willing to read parts of it over and over again, each time peeling away a bit more of its philosophy. In this regard, it’s similar to reading Shakespeare - you can read it once through and enjoy the story, but to uncover its treasures you have to put in the work. In that regard, I could see myself coming back to this one day and spending a longer period of time with it.
Blood Meridian is often praised as being one of the all-time great Westerns, or anti-Westerns and I’m glad I experienced it. It’s a book that will stay with me and keep me thinking for a long time.