Blood Meridian

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Average customer rating 4.8 (9 comments)

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This book was absolutely amazing and beautifully written. The lack of punctuation takes awhile to get used too, but in a way makes the 1840s setting feel more realistic. This book is not for the faint of heart. I have already returned to Powell's to pick up another Cormac McCarthy title.

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I hesitated to start reading this book because I've never enjoyed westerns. But the writing in Blood Meridian hooked me. The story is a dark Bildungsroman with a tragic conclusion. The action is rendered in graphic prose that feels like poetry. The story, the atmosphere, the writing style, the mystery of "where is this book going?" -- all transcend the western genre, which is probably why this book is almost never found in the "western" section of bookstores. In fact, where it belongs is in the "classics" section, because McCarthy produced a masterpiece with Blood Meridian.

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There are two things I can always count on to be bleak: Nick Cave songs and Cormac McCarthy novels. Blood Meridian is an amazing and graphically brutal work. While the bloody Sam Peckinpah style violence proliferates every chapter, its the magnificent and poetic prose that helped me navigate this hellish West that at times bore more resemblance to a Hieronymous Bosch painting. Unlike other writers, McCarthy writes about violence as violence and not as anything symbolic. He is definitely one of the truly great American authors.

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Powerful and haunting.

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Rather early in this novel two things are clear. First, it is one of the most beautifully written books ever written. Second, as others have noted, it is quite violent and brutal. The depravity of the characters seems to have no end, yet the sheer magnitude of the writing also seems to have no end.

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**I'll keep this very short and to the point** Brutal and poetic. Beautiful and unflinchingly violent. A mythic tale of the wild west. Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece and one of the greatest American novels--up there for me with Moby Dick.

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This book is a masterpiece, immediately engaging and unforgettable. Also as brutal as you've heard it is. I had to give it five stars in the hopes of upping it's overall rating (I will resist writing a review of a review, but the gentlemen who didn't like the message of the book after reading 30 pages of it has skewed the average unfairly). An engrossing story written with inspiration. Only don't read it if you are put off by violence because this thing is pretty tough.

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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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I really, really wanted to finish this book ... ... but I couldn't. As a lover of literature, I consider myself a pretty patient -- even stubborn -- reader. I don't give up easily on books, even when I have decided it's not the book I thought it was, or even if I've determined the writing isn't very good or the plot uninteresting. I've slogged through 700- and 900-page novels before out of sheer determination, even if halfway through I knew it probably wouldn't be worth it, and never once skipped to the end to get the "payoff". I have a great deal of respect for the journey the author wants us to take, and choose to trust the author for the one or two or even twelve hours I am spending with their creation. I say all that to say that Blood Meridian, not even 400 pages, beat me. There's a lot that's good about it: McCarthy has a unique and very compelling style (something that's all too rare in today's literature) and his imagery is stark and memorable: I still remember the incredibly written scene where the Indian tribe roars into view, shouting terrible war cries and decorated with war paint and bones and in all other ways appearing so ferocious they strike fear into the heart of their supposed conquerors. And yet after about 20 or 30 pages in, it became a chore to get through each page. I had to make myself read a few pages at a time and then let myself have a break. Finally, I gave up at about the 100-page mark, trying several times to make myself pick it back up, and failing. I don't know if it was the run-on style of writing that forced me to pay close attention to every word: it meant that I could never catch the novel's rhythm and escape into the world the author had created. (Imagine trying to enjoy a song that stops and starts every 10 seconds, and you'll get some of what I mean.) It might have been the relentless violence: I'm not squeamish, but there was no relief, no redemption, barely a pause. If the characters went to a town, I knew better than to hope there'd be a moment of peace or even a moment of reflection -- on their part on on the part of the reader -- but more likely they'd start a fight and slaughter the townspeople instead. I began to dread each page. It might have been the fact that there was not one character to root for in the novel. I'm not saying novels have to contain at least one "positive" or "good" character -- it's one of the skills of a great writer to make a character sympathetic even if the reader neither likes nor agrees with that character. But I couldn't feel any of that for a single character -- all I felt was revulsion. But I think it was actually the combination of all of those things that finally beat me -- I realized that, if I kept reading, I was in for more than 250 pages more of relentless violence and horror; I realized there'd be no character who changed or transformed, and that nobody I could identify with was going to come onto the scene. So I began to ask myself what was the tradeoff for suffering through so much more of it. From what I could glean of the book's message, it was this: the border at that time was a dehumanizing, monstrous place that produced soulless, amoral humans capable of unthinkable destruction. And I could see that McCarthy was portraying all "sides" -- the Indians, the Mexicans, and the Americans-- as equally guilty. For the first part of the message, I don't know why it would be necessary to take hundreds of pages to simply repeat, over and over and over, the events and horror that McCarthy wants to use to make such a point. A well-written 40-page short story would have done just fine. And as for the second part -- that all the parties were the same -- I just can't agree. Were the Apaches, who were resisting the theft of their land by both the U.S. (and before that, by Mexico), on an equal par with those stealing their land? All sides committed bloody, vicious acts, but to portray things as if they were all equally wrong is to be untruthful. And I don't remember who I'm quoting with this, but: "Fiction tells lies to tell the truth." Everyone knows that fiction is not "true" in one sense: they know the characters and events didn't actually exist, they know there's no Captain Ahab or Iago or Kid in real life. But fiction is, ultimately, saying something about the world, through all the elements of its story, and I feel that nobody should use the power of their pen to tell what in actuality amounts to lies -- not the "lies" of the fiction they create, but an actual lie that comes through in what they are ultimately saying about their subject or the world at large. Would anyone want to read, for example, a novel that argued that the horrific rubber trade in the Congo (where the colonists chopped off the hands of those that didn't bring in enough rubber) was good for the native peoples? Or a novel that ultimately argued that there is no global warming, no environmental problem, and that actually the earth is doing just fine and dandy? I admire the author's style, and even further admire his setting out to depict the border and the wars of conquest in a way that does not romanticize or even identify with the conquerors, as so much fiction set at that time and place do. And furthermore, I can appreciate that so much of what made the book hard to read -- the run-on style, the spare brutality of its prose, the amoral and vicious characters, the endless violence and sense of dirt and filth that the reader can almost taste -- are part of the world the author is depicting. But I just couldn't see putting myself through so many more pages of one of the more horrifying books I'd ever read, for a message I had already grasped 30 pages into it. Maybe there was more I would have gotten out of it if I'd stuck with it -- and maybe one of these days I'll make myself try again. Hopefully my own story will help you decide for yourself if this book is worth it -- but know what you're getting into.