Book Review: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

[Dave Gray]

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) by Cormac McCarthy

Premise: A 14 year old boy joins up with a gang of scalp hunters on a violent scourge across the Old West.

I don't think I can try to review this book without first explaining a little bit about my history with books.  I'm not a fiction reader, by most accounts.  I make myself read one book per year (though this year it's two!) just to make my brain work at it, but longform fiction isn't really my cup of tea.  It's not so much that I don't like the stories, but I really have to work at it and it takes me a while.  And because I'm reading just one book, I sometimes pick something that's a little meatier or that's been on my list for a while -- classics or heavily referenced works, rather than an "airport novel" that goes down easy.

In the past few years I've read things like: Frankenstein, Moonraker, and Lord of the Flies

This book was recommended to me by someone I respect and I decided to just dive in, with the question "Tell me what you think of the Judge."  With that said, I don't really know how to review a book and of books I've read, this is like none of them.

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Where to start?

This novel's format is unconventional in many ways.  It makes it hard to read, but once I understood its methods and language, I stopped trying to understand it in traditional terms and just let it wash over me.  That sounds douchey as I type it, but it is worth mentioning.  McCarthy uses things like archaic language -- and not just a word here or there, but multiple in the same sentence -- like specific names for parts of a saddle that you wouldn't know unless you had a hobby in antique saddle-making methods.  He doesn't always name his characters.  The book doesn't have a traditional lead character, and if it does, it's happy to abandon their perspective for large sections of the novel.  It doesn't translate when characters are talking in Spanish.  It doesn't use quotation marks to indicate who is speaking.  It will use a subject without a predicate.  It has segments written in period-specific slang or accents.  It has page-long run-on sentences without a period.  And it will go to great lengths describing every detail of crossing a river and then drop major, narrative-changing information in one sentence.

I spent a good portion of the first quarter of the book wrestling against these things -- spending too much time figuring out what a word meant, who was talking, or trying to grasp the exact goings-on of a page full of unpunctuated prose.  When, it reality, it didn't really matter.  Once I figured out how to read it, the specifics didn't matter.  It was as much about the vibes of a scene as the specifics. A run on sentence about arrows and blood and smoke and tears and spit and stink and leather and grit was really just a way to illustrate the fog of war.

McCarthy also tells lots of stories within stories.  It's hard to tell which of these stories matter to the greater tale, in terms of plot relevance to what is happening, or what is just an aside of something screwed up and strange.  And I think that, even after finishing the book, it's all and none, depending on what themes you can gather from the little tales.  So much of my time, especially at first, was spent trying to put things in boxes and this just isn't that kind of experience.  On the flip side, seemingly major events are mentioned in passing.  The deaths of lead characters, incredibly strange and inexplicable things are sometimes dropped as a "by the way".  Sometimes these things are never talked about again.  What have I read that is figurative vs. literal?  What is actual and what is allegory?  What is the meaning of this character's inexplicable action?  But I was often left wondering what something meant, thinking that more would be revealed.  That was almost never the case.

And the violence...  Blood Meridian is strictly a narrative.  It never puts you in the mind of any character.  It never assigns judgment or tells you how any character feels about the atrocities that they witness or carry out.  They simply are.  And the prose is cold and uninterested in the morality.  Violence and war and their value are core themes.  The novel doesn't shy from horrific description of the cruelest most empathy-devoid, unfair acts ever committed.  And I think the normalcy in which the violence is described is what is upsetting in its own right, told like a nature documentary.  Violence just IS.

The main question is "What is the Judge?"  I come away thinking that he's some allegory for the inevitable and timeless nature of evil, perhaps the literal devil manifested in a human form.  A silver-tongued menace that you're drawn to, wiping out everything in his path, ultimately inescapable.

The book's ending is what one should expect from a tale like this -- there is no traditional ending insofar as a bow that wraps up what happens.  The ending is up to you to unravel....not only the actual things that occur, but what they mean to the greater themes.

I can't say I fully understand it, but it feels like a masterpiece.