review

In addition to watching the recent movie No Country for Old Men and reading The Road, I thought I’d explore Cormac McCarthy more deeply by reading his novel Blood Meridian. I’d heard about it from friends and intrigued for a good story, I dove in. Thrown in is more appropriate, like an infant into the deep end of the pool, from atop the high dive while held by a seven-foot-tall, four-hundred pound freakshow delicately bouncing upon the board to get as much leverage as insanely possible. The atomic splat of sentience that resulted after reading the work brought a self-awareness that I now have truly entered McCarthy’s world in as much as his writing syntax will allow.

Which is an exquisite thing. Blood Meridian is an astounding work that spans styles and genres, from the most erudite works of literature, to historical fiction, to sheer horror. It takes a story, an era ( the old West) that has been fantasized and romanticized to the point of nausea, and recreates it for what it most likely approximated in my opinion…unbridled lawlessness, havoc and murder.

Blood Meridian is a work depicting immense violence, detailing the events surrounding the escapades of a young character called ‘the kid’, as he makes his way westward from Tennessee around the year 1848. He wanders purposelessly until faced with the prospect of adventure in joining a band of scalp hunters destined for the American Southwest. Initially starting with a more specific objective, the band’s purpose slowly embraces the means rather than the end, under the direction of their leaders Captain Glanton and Holden, more commonly known as ‘the judge’; the band consequently sweeps across the southwest deserts and mountains in a sandstorm of terror, through Texas, Mexico, California and all places in between.

Though without glorifying war, McCarthy’s style of writing leaves no detail of atrocity untold. The extent to which he elaborates on brutality and chaos reifies his more or less consistent theme of society’s lack of morality, or at least the laughable facade of law and order. Which leads a reader to believe that this work is just as much a philosophical offering as it is one of fiction. That there are those among us who can manipulate situations and people to the extent as one particular character does in this story is the most frightening aspect. His insistence that existence of something requires someone else’s consent is a highly disturbing credo and is the underlying current to the justification of events as they progress.

In any case, that violence is eternal is but one aspect and message of Blood Meridian that’s thoroughly thought provoking and engrossing and bizarre and frightening. Read it, if you get the chance.