Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West | Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West | Cormac McCarthy | How the West Was Won: Behind the Blow

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Blood Meridian: Or...

	Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West Cormac McCarthy Vintage, 1992 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 304 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridianbrilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

literary landmark

It seems that most of the negative reviews this book receives are holding it to the standards of commercial fiction. This is not commercial fiction, it is not supposed to be a Clint Eastwood western, and it certainly isn't meant for those who ignore the beauty of McCarthy's writing because they think this simile is too vague or that word too archaic.
This is a difficult book - it is difficult to read, to digest, to fathom, and even to stomach at parts. It is literature. You aren't always supposed to be able to "connect" with or relate to characters. A book doesn't always need a fast-moving plot. This book, rather, is a collage of scenes which, in relation to each other, form a cohesive whole.
Except for "No Country for Old Men," McCarthy's books are more character- and concept-driven than plot-driven.
McCarthy is an absolute master storyteller, narrator, and stylist. It's understandable that some like his more sparse work of recent years. His literary genius is evident in these works as well. But it is incorrect to mistake his more "baroque" works (like this and "Suttree," which I have been slowly ingesting over the past few months) as him trying to find his style. And long, obscure vocabulary doesn't automatically mean that the writer is pretensious. If you don't like the style, that's your business, but just because you don't like it doesn't make it inferior.
"Blood Meridian" is certainly not for everyone. It is horrifying at times. My first time reading through it, I stopped 100 pages into it because of the violence. It took me a month to give it another try. I wouldn't recommend it to many people I know personally. But as a work of art it is brilliant. The prose is poetic, the themes are timeless, the characters (particularly the Judge) are immortal. It isn't my favorite McCarthy book but it's more amazing as a book than his other novels.

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How the West Was Won: Behind the Blow

The Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and his contemporaries dispelled most myths of good cowboys and bad cowboys. His influence spread upon others, whose successive cinematic paintings would make the bleak Western desert landscape filled with bloodthirsty ruffians common knowledge to audiences. But while Angel Eyes Sentenza, Tuco Ramirez, and Clint Eastwood's nameless killers were Shakespearean in their amoral aspects, there was still something civil and sane in those men amidst leering Death.

Here, morality is a virtue felt by victims while vice is the religion of the victors. The Americas twisted by Manifest Destiny have interbred the demonized Native Americans and Spanish, and it is almost like they have birthed a new race of devils as savage as their white oppressors. Scalps are the bloodstained market's chief commodity as the roving Glanton Gang murders Native American settlements and sells these items to towns warped in celebrating killers as heroes. The naive worshipful cities soon have their dazzling savage dreams brought upon them when the Glanton Gang sieges them, scalp the innocent townspeople, and in a continuance of falsehoods, sell these counterfeit scalps as the genuine article only for the celebrated sellers to become marauding thieves again.

Almost as an American God of Western myth, Glanton's right-hand man Judge Holden is much like the serpentine deceiver, who is all but named as the martial Pope of the war party. Even when narrated to be lying, Holden's gravitas is utterly inspiring and his scholarly nature and sophisticated vocabulary among almost cancerous nomads on the mind make us want to join in the revelry for him until he murders children and puppies in an act of Heraclitean warmongering in the name of mankind's eventual future as overlord of the wild nature that would restrain him. Virtue in war is an oxymoron, an impasse to man's sovereignty, and all are enemies to him in our fragile plane of existence. Sometimes when we hear of hurricanes and the venomous snakes out there, we want to believe in the Judge's anarchic crusade against nature even though that entails monstrous amorality as treachery to our origins and a sort of ecological suicide brought upon an ignorance that we are a part of nature as much as everything else. But other men neutral to or against the Glanton Gang are also categorized with rampaging nature and as they slay enemy Native American settlements and soldiers sent out to task them for their crimes with flying colors, we seriously start to ask if such bloody imperialism is wrong if it guarantees peace from everlasting supremacy. As natural competitors bent on survival against an overwhelmingly hostile world, it is easy to shatter our moral compass and believe the Judge's lies until our need for violence as a weapon of law becomes a lust for war such as when unlawful aspirants rise to usurp the all too weak natural sovereign's throne and success or failure, this continuing cycle ensures that the world's fauna is only bones and corpses.

The Kid runs from his abusive home at fourteen and eventually comes into the company of these warrior cultists. Even amidst such ruthless combatants, the Kid never loses his goodness as he once pulls out the arrow of a wounded comrade that would have died otherwise. As the closest thing we identify with virtue in a bloody wasteland, he and Holden shine like beacons of opposing forces, more than men, and given the Judge's ability to be in two places at once and immunity to age, we pray the Kid is such an angelic deity to oppose this demon that at times seems little more than a hairless Robin Goodfellow.

In our current era we face a similar dilemma: Zealous glorification of our heroes as stainless statues and hatred of our enemies into mad beasts. We believe the Judge to this day into persecuting all that would dare to walk astray our path. The results have become reminiscent of mythical battles and mutate us into devils dressed in ripped and pasted man flesh upon demonic hides and where most of our fallen kin have learned to hide their cloven hooves in military boots and behind the staggering piles of waste in our shining criminal history. Manifest Destiny still lives. It is our favorite. It will never die.

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"Good God almighty..."

Going into Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel, I was well aware of its notorious reputation for extreme violent content; having, in recent months, already experienced the sometimes disturbing imagery of the stark modern western No Country For Old Men (2005), the post-apocalyptic The Road (2006), and the gritty "Border Trilogy" (1992's All The Pretty Horses, 1994's The Crossing, and 1998's Cities Of The Plain), I thought I could just prepare myself for anything.

The bulk of the story is set along the Texas-Mexico border circa 1850, and it concerns a teenage runaway from Tennessee -- known simply as "the kid" -- who takes up with a company of scalp-collectors led by Captain John Joel Glanton and the mysterious, hulking albino Judge Holden. This rather thin and meandering plot almost gets lost in thick tangles of relentlessly and almost oppressively ugly description -- I often found myself re-reading passages multiple times just to figure out what had just happened or who was saying what (as McCarthy tends not to set off his usually spare dialogue with quotation marks). Plus, there are no particularly sympathetic characters for us to root for throughout: Though we see the majority of the action through the kid's eyes, he is basically a cipher; and while the judge is probably the most interesting and fully developed character here, he only becomes more frightening and repulsive as more aspects of his personality are revealed.

On the surface, this would be merely a depressing symphony of bloodletting, brain matter, bones, bodily wastes, nudity, corpses, filth, scalpings and other mutilations, and (so help me) cruelty to animals. But there seems to be more going on here that makes this strangely compelling... For one thing, especially in the later chapters, every single time I felt myself growing numb to the violence and ugliness, and I thought McCarthy had gone as far as he could possibly go, something else even more brutal and gruesome would always come along to shock and shake me. Plus, as unbearable as that could've been, I think it helps that McCarthy's idiosyncratic prose style is so matter-of-fact and yet so poetic throughout, his narrative seems devoid of moral judgment and emotional excess -- it simply paints pictures in your head for you to interpret and feel about however you see fit.

More importantly, I don't think there would be much point in subjecting yourself to all this stuff if it weren't meant to open your eyes to some often-ignored historical events (specifically in America's westward expansion); and indeed, I wonder if McCarthy had just grown disenchanted with the romance and mythology of the western genre, and thus decided to strip them away and say, "Folks, this is how it really was in that time and place, and it wasn't pretty." And furthermore, I wonder if McCarthy was trying to provoke people with this material -- deliberately pushing the envelope with it just to pose the question, "What's more obscene, my graphic language or the fact that stuff like this actually happened in history?"

Bottom line: Though widely acknowledged as a modern classic, this is not the first Cormac McCarthy novel I would recommend to anybody. But if you have already read at least one other of his books and are familiar with his unique style -- as well as his unflinching depictions of dark subject matter -- I think you might find Blood Meridian a wrenching but rewarding piece of work.

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Wow. This One Has Stuck With Me For Years

"Blood Meridian" is one of the few books that has stuck with me for years. Due to the graphic violence, I don't recommend it to a lot of people, and I must admit that it put me off for quite a while at the beginning. That said, it has passed the test of time with me. It is one of VERY few books that I have re-read. When I finished this book, I just had to take a deep breath. I'm not some literature major, or someone who wants to analyze all the symbolism that is obviously present here, but I still found this to be accessible and powerful. The language is magnificent, and the entire book has a "gut level" feel that, while taking a long time to cultivate, is truly unique. I've read all of McCarthy's novels and this is by far my favorite. If you really liked "No Country For Old Men" (a glorified screenplay, in my opinion) and/or "The Road", this book may NOT be for you. If you liked the Border Trilogy, particularly "The Crossing", then buy this and read it immediately. You might also like "Paradise" by Toni Morrison.

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Brutal but exhilarating.

This is the fictionalized account of the Glanton Gang, a rag-tag band of men who roamed the American west around 1850. Originally hired by Mexican towns to hunt down a group of Apaches that had been terrorizing the citizens, the gang eventually roams the countryside with an insatiable bloodlust, violently murdering and scalping everyone they encounter.

There are no "good guys" in Blood Meridian, and if there is one inarguable theme to take away from a book that is both deep and cryptic, it is that neither the image of the cowboy hero battling the blood-thirsty Indians as portrayed in John Wayne movies, nor the revisionist history of the noble savage falling victim to the westward expansion of America is accurate. The picture that McCarthy paints is a west full of savage brutality, where nobody is innocent. It is an apocalypse of violence, surreal and unsettling. In no place and no character do we find sanctuary from the depravity. McCarthy spares no one: women, children, puppies and priests are slaughtered without prejudice. It is a tale with much posturing and philosophizing but no apparent morality, where destruction is as natural as the sky or the mountains.

McCarthy's writing is bombastic and beautiful, juxtaposing imagery one might expect more in Dante's INFERNO with poetic descriptions of the open land. The characters read like a perverse version of Chaucer, many of them with titles rather than names: The Kid and the ex-priest. The judge, Holden, based on a real-life man, is the second in command. He is an enormous, pale white apparition, a hairless monstrosity with the gravity of a Colonel Kurtz. He is a poet, a preacher, a philosopher, knowledgeable in natural sciences, history, and the arts. He is the spiritual leader of the gang, and the moral nadir of humanity, the most brutal and memorable character of the book.

BLOOD MERIDIAN is not for the faint of heart. It's unflinching in its personification of evil and depiction of the brutality of which men are capable. It has been criticized by some for its over-the-top language, and though it's not as sparse as THE ROAD or NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, the imagery is just as powerful. In fact, some of the apocalyptic imagery is repeated, perhaps more suitably, in THE ROAD. But THE ROAD is about an apocalypse yet to come. BLOOD MERIDIAN is about an apocalypse that occurred 150 years ago.

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