Bloody and a Little Tedious
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Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian traces the kid, that is all we know him as, on an abominable adventure. The story traverse the wild west of the Texas and Mexico border landscape. It depicts the debauchery of a gang of rebels led by someone known as the judge and a character called Glanton. This gang ride on and on committing pointless pillage and murder. The reader is drawn into a beautiful rugged terrain where there is little or no sense of society and certainly no moral compass.
Blood Meridian does not depend on story telling in a conventional sense. Rather the novel's structure and execution is reminiscence of a fly on the wall documentary. The narrator holds the camera and points it at a series of events that is observed. This approach is clearly hightlied by the fact that each chapter summarises events in a pithy manner. Further, as the story progresses paragraph after paragraph begins in this manner: "They rode on, They paused without the cantina, They had lost four men" and so on in a deadpan manner. This approach has the effect of wearing down the reader.
For me the above presents a major flaw with the novel. McCarthy simply report events. Indeed, the novel is said to be based on true events that took place in the nineteenth century. There was no moral dilema for the band of rogues, there was no psychological conflict for any of the characters nor was there any conflict between the individual and his social milieu. As I read, I kept repeating to myself tell me something I don't already know or could researh in the relevant history. In other words, the novel is meant to reveal something new in the story it tells. Arguably, that is one of things that distinguishes it from mere story telling.
Nonetheless, it cannot be said of McCarthy's characters that they operate outside a social context. The politico/social world in which the chracters operate is a Hobbesian one, where the: "Life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." We know this because the narrator tells us that: "Here beyond men's judgment all covenants were brittle." In this new world men (for it is men who rape and plunder) are asserting themselves and the weak becomes vanquished. Ironically, if McCarthy purports Christian values then even God is unable to help. In one passage the kid enters a church to discover: "There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who'd barricaded themselves in this house of God against the heathen."
The impact of reading Blood Meridian is that one is left feeling battered by its relentless visciousness and barbarity. The diction of the prose is one of repetitive cruelty. In one pragraph the kid and his prisoner companions saw: "blackeyed young girls ..., a pack of vicious looking human ..., riders wearing scapulars or neckless of dried and blackened human ears." The prose also conjures up a sense of black-darkness. Many of McCarty's adjectives are compound words made up of black, for example blackeye, blackened and blackhaired. Along with the fact that the Indians are labelled: "half naked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh," someone with a politically correct bent would accuse at least McCarty's narrator of racism.
What lifts McCarthy's narrative from its depressing bleakness is at times his marvellous descriptive writing. Here is an example that comes alive in onomatopoeia fashion: "The first cries of birds in the trees along the river and the clink of harness and the snuffle of horses and the gentle sound of their cropping." These sounds are set in the predawn dark so even though we cannot visualise the scene we nonetheless get a good image of it by the sounds. This is first rate writing.
However, McCarthy's style is a mixed bag of the impenetrable and the transparent. In places the syntax of McCarthy's sentences is biblical in style. For example, "Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no sould save he." On the other hand, the use of figurative language captures and evokes the desolate landscape very well. For instance, "... where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus."
About a third of the way through this book, I felt that I had the measure of it and as I was not enjoying it I should cease reading it any further. Nonetheless, I ploughed on and discovered some passages of great writing. However, the sum of these great passages does not make up for a whole book that could be called great.
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Disappointing: Not as engrossing as other McCarthy Novels
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I have already read several Cormac McCarthy novels and found them all thoroughly entertaining, emotional and thought provoking. I am sorry to say that I found 'Blood Meridian' quite disappointing; in fact, I stopped reading it just over 3/4 of the way in as I was getting bored with it and just couldn't be bothered to finish it. Despite it clearly being a work of McCarthy, with his fantastic descriptive techniques and conversational style of writing, the story just did not hold my attention or provoke my interest in the same way his other works did.
The plot covers an ever-changing selection of male characters, with a few that are prominent and have an enduring-presence, who are involved in the 'Indian' wars of the 1840s in West Texas and Mexico. They are essentially mercenaries, except that there is very little discrimination as to who, or what, is killed nor whether a reward will actually be forthcoming for their 'work'.
There is an extreme level of violence, a lot of it is senseless and unprovoked and it goes largely unexplained or justified. Whilst I was not put-off by that violence (or lack of reasoning for it), it was essentially this and other repetitive occurrences which dominate the plot, with nothing else of enough note happening to maintain my attention. I believe the main premise of the novel is to highlight that indiscriminate and brutal violence, but I don't think that was good enough reason to justify it being fictionalised with no other significant elements to the tale.
For me, the magic of McCarthy's writing is that despite there rarely being an all-encompassing plot, an interest is maintained by a combination of being interested in his fascinating characters and/or the wry humour associated with their story.
Blood Meridian has one interesting character (The Judge), but he does appear until some way into the novel nor feature prominently enough from then on (despite him clearly evolving into the central character); crucially, I did not feel any connection or real interest in the fate of any of the characters.
Yes, as I have already alluded to, the identifiable methods and style McCarthy uses to describe the action are present and occasionally breathtaking. But halfway through the novel, whilst I was still engrossed, I realised the monotony of what was happening and slowly (and reluctantly) realised that this was not classic McCarthy; I think there is good work inside this novel, but it needs to be about half the length.
If I compare this book to my favourite McCarthy work, 'Suttree' (see my Amazon review), there is no contest. When I note that Blood Meridian was published in 1985 and Suttree in 1989, I can only presume that McCarthy matured as a writer at some point between those dates.
By all means, give Blood Meridian a try to experience a unique and noteworthy writing-style describing dramatic violence and traumatic life, but don't expect the story to develop much from what is outlined within the first few pages.....
My recommendation is to read Suttree instead !
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Not for me thanks
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Ok so there is great prose and a dark story line but it is so extreme what is the point? I struggled to get into this book and could not make any connections with the characters; it was difficult to understand why they were doing what they were doing and where they were going. The coincidences were also beyond credible. I would give it a bye and read "No country" or "the road"
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Underwhelmed
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I struggled to get into 'Blood Meridian', struggled to make a strong enough emotional connection with the characters to want to continue reading. The prose is beautiful but the novel lacked something for me. I found 'All the Pretty Horses' far more compelling and well-rounded.
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written in blood
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What a pleasure to read an author you didn't think you'd be that keen on and to discover that they're quite brilliant. After devouring The Road recently next on the list was his 'masterpiece' Blood Meridian. I have an irrational hatred of Westerns as a genre so I was tentative to say the least but whilst this is a very different book in many ways it is still suffused with the apocolyptic vision, the extreme violence of man and at its heart a child trying to survive.
'The kid' is a young boy from Tennessee, born during a meteor shower in 1833, who runs away from home at 14 and quickly establishes himself as a fighter and survives his first shooting (that's the first two pages). At a religious meeting in Nacogdoches he first encounters 'Judge' Holden, the huge demonic presence that dominates this novel. Seven feet tall with a vast, domed hairless head he cuts an imposing figure and causes a riot when he accuses a preacher of paedophilia and bestiality, later claiming to have never met the man before. The kid will cross paths with him again more than once but not before he has his second brush with death whilst on a fillibustering mission. In an unforgettable two page paragraph they are attacked by Comanche warriors and as one of the few survivors he walks away 'stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself'.
The bulk of the novel describes his time with Glanton and his gang of scalp-hunters. This is an age where the westward expansion of the United States means a bounty for any Apache scalp and this leads them into ever greater acts of violence against innocent natives and Mexicans. Amongst this group is the judge who, almost biblicly, appeared in the desert at a time of great need, helping the gang to manufature gunpowder mysteriously from the top of a mountain. Just like the kid each man of the gang claims to have met the judge at some point before. Who is this man who kills for sport and claims at the end of the novel that he will never die?
The plot of this novel is not really the important thing; this is a battle between the evil and violent side of human nature and the quality which sets the kid apart: Mercy. The violence is unremitting and extreme, too hard for some readers to stomach no doubt but written with such exquisite detail it is hard not to admire. Like a painting by Brueghel or the infamous Nazi sculptures of the Chapman brothers McCarthy is describing a landscape of violence, as when we come across a bush hung with dead babies 'Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being'.
I feel I could quote vast chunks of text as there are so many passages that stick in the mind, recalling classics of literature as John Banville has surmised, 'The book reads like a conflation of the Inferno, The Iliad and Moby Dick.' Near the end of the novel the kid spots a large man walking towards them, a smaller figure beside him: The judge with a parasol made of bone and animal hide and an imbecile on a lead, 'like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die'. I found myself thinking of Pozzo leading Lucky through the wilderness of Waiting for Godot for a meeting just as extraordinary.
This novel is a masterpiece, describing in detailed prose the very qualities in man that place the concepts of hell, purgatory and the banality of evil very firmly on Earth rather than banished to the fiery regions of religious judgement. The everyman hero, the grotesque adversary, the ambiguous ending and the ambitious and mythical quality to the writing make this a novel which surely deserves its place as a runner-up in the best American fiction of the last 25 years.
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