(I have reviewed the following interesting product on a competing site. I have drastically cut and somewhat modified it here so as not to violate that site’s terms of service.)
In 1983, Cormac McCarthy published his offbeat novel Blood Meridian. It is a truly brutal landscape of incessant violence described in brutally frank words, jagged lines, and blinding images branded into the mind’s eye with a hot poker. Murder, pillaging, filth and genocide were as much a part of the American Westward expansion in the 19th Century as heroism, derring-do and little houses on the prairie.
Yet there is extraordinary beauty and style in the book’s bestiality. Blood Meridian is steeped in violence and a measure of historic accuracy unvarnished by the romantic Western mystique -- not only does ’’Good’’ not triumph, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine ’’Good’’ in the first place for lack of the protagonists’ moral compass.
In that way McCarthy (All The Pretty Horses, Suttree, Child of God, The Orchard Keeper) has written a somber parable of biblical proportions that defines the underbelly of Man through an examination of his irredeemable baser instincts. Yet, for its graphically grim side, it nontheless has unequivocal literary merit on several fronts. That’s because the savagery is not gratuitous.
The novel’s chief protagonist, known only as ’The Kid, ’ is a disturbed Tennessee teenager who leaves his school master father’s home for the unknown possibilities of Texas after the war with Mexico. He immediately stumbles into violence, brutality, and the inexorable ugliness of amorality. The novel reaches its climax after the Kid is sold by his Mexican jailers to a band of marauders including the nefarious Judge Holden (reportedly based on a true figure of the West by the same name who was a leader in the so-called Glanton Gang hired by the Mexican government to find, kill and scalp Indians on both sides of the Texas border.)
McCarthy’s novel challenges the traditional image of the Western novel in several ways. The Kid is anti-Western in that he forms no bond with anyone, friend or foe, or even a gun or his horse. The myth of a solitary man inextricably linked with something -- any single thing or any single person -- for whatever reason in a struggle against nature, enemies, or both, is shattered. No companion can be trusted and no foe is worthy of even grudging respect because everyone in this desolate universe is truly a dead man.
He doesn’t even form an attachment to the solitary Western terrain. Not only is there no welcoming hearth, fort or shelter for the Kid to dream about (not to mention actually come back to), for all the gritty detail of sand and dirt and stone there isn’t even any defined landscape worthy of the name. Every town is an illusion of a social construct. There is no water to speak of in a region ’where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish.’ There is no vegetation worthy of the name...only dehydration, and parched earth as seen from the gates of Hell.
Against this bleak backdrop the Kid is both a blank slate on the one hand reflecting nothing of his own onto the forbidding environment he finds, and on the other a sponge soaking all the despair he experiences into the canvas of his life-in-progress. He is unencumbered by history, values or predispositions of any kind. He simply is what is all around him, steered by Fate from circumstance to circumstance. For his part, Judge Holden is a truly despicable and Machiavellian Dog of War, scalping an Indian child and then “dandling” with the scalp for days as he rides. Holden is a chameleon-like monster risen from the primal mud who blends in to whatever landscape he find himself in, no matter how forbidding. If ever a literary figure represented the Devil, it is Holden.
Through it all, there’s McCarthy’s writing, vivid yet terse, choppy yet flowing, simple yet layered, spread willy-nilly on the canvas yet organized and intimate like a diary. McCarthy builds fascinating word connections into phrase after phrase – “a region electric and wild, ” and “evil terrain” or “hungry country” and “thirsty country.” He turns objective descriptions into sensations with lines like, “a land of some other order whose true geology was not stone but fear.” Finally, say what you will about this grisly nature of this set piece, McCarthy’s writing is disturbingly evocative. Because of the context of a limitless dark Universe, it successfully pushes the envelope of excess.
This is one is one for the ages if you have the stomach for it. Welcome to the dark side.