Blood Meridian is based on the wanderings and crimes of the Glanton Gang on the Texas-Mexico border in 1849-1850, but it is no historical novel. To say that Blood Meridian is about the Old West is like saying that Moby Dick is about whaling. This is a very great book, a soul-stirring book. If you read it, if you can get through it, you will not be able to get it out of your head for a very long time.
The setting is the vast southwestern desert, a land of ghosts. (If you've ever spent time there, you know what I mean. It is haunted, spirit-infested. You want to be careful about approaching distant figures.) The landscape is harsh, sun blasted and virtually waterless. populated mainly by men, horses, mules, and wolves (not mere coyotes). As I read my way through it I thought of the "ominous tract" into which Browning's Childe Roland turned. The men, horses and mules suffer and die, and the men and wolves are carnivorous and merciless.
Blood Meridian is violent. That is a very great understatement. It is drenched with blood, and in some of the most horrible ways imaginable (and McCarthy leaves it entirely to your imagination at one crucial point). McCarthy intends to curdle your blood, and if you read Blood Meridian he will. But it is not the violence that I remember most. What I remember most is a growing and then prevailing dreadful expectation: What will these people do next? What will we humans do next? Wolves are everywhere in this book, and man is wolf to man.
Blood Meridian gives us one of the most memorable characters in our literature, if not the most memorable. If you think Captain Ahab was a piece of work, wait until you meet Judge Holden. He may be a man or he may be a spirit. He says that he never sleeps and that he will never die. I never could decide what he is. But whatever else he (or it) might be, he is terrifying. He is the kind of being with which you are never quite sure how you stand. Part of you is glad to have him around, especially in times of crisis, but part of you knows that if you are around him long enough you will come to a bad end, that some night "thy soul may be required of thee." He is Siva, the destroyer, the lord of the dance. He is Jeffers' "wild god of the world."
You may have heard about McCarthy's eccentric prose style. I won't try to describe it. Instead, I'll show it to you. The following is from an early scene in which a company of outlaw militia traveling in the desert encounter a cattle herd, only to realize at the last minute that the drovers are not vaqueros, but Comanche warriors. Here is McCarthy's description of the onset of the encounter:
"The lattermost of the drovers were now coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already you could see through the dust on the ponies? hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. 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 uniforms 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 weddingveil and some in headgear of 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.
"Oh my god, said the sergeant."
Now, you either think that is great writing or you don't. I went back to this scene after I finished the book and typed it out, just to see how it would feel. I think it a wondrous, astonishing passage, terrifying in its context. How long did McCarthy labor over that passage? What did the early drafts look like? Did that language just flow out of him, or did he struggle to produce it? Oh yes, have a dictionary at hand, because even if you are a serious reader you are going to learn a lot of new words.
Some reviewers have complained about the book's ambiguous ending, and especially about the mysterious epilogue. I found the ending and the epilogue to be entirely in keeping with the mood of the book. Blood Meridian is allegorical and ambiguous. Don't try to figure out what it means. It's like reading poetry: How does it make you feel? What does it make you think about? What do those reactions say about you? This is a reading experience in which every reader's attention belongs to the author, but every reader's soul is their own, and McCarthy is aiming for your soul.
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