Blood Meridian

It took me a while to slug through it, but I finally finished reading Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel "Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West." It was a brutal read, both in regards to the text and the mental energy expended to read it, but I finish it with a sense of smugness that I have tackled some literary monster.

The book loosely follows the journeys of a character known only as "the kid" and traces his life around his encounters with the antagonist character - Judge Holden (almost exclusively referred to as "the judge"). The two characters' fates are irreversibly intertwined after the judge rescues the kid from a Mexican prison in return for the kid joining the judge's band of scalp-hunters. Most of the novel then follows the scalp-hunters killing sprees, until they are finally ambushed and mostly killed. The few survivors are hunted down, one-by-one, by the judge, until the kid is the only one left. (At this point, the kid is suddenly referred to as "the man" - suggesting that he is beyond the edge of innocence.) In the final scene, the judge has tracked down the kid / the man down in Texas and, although the kid's fate is left unknown and ambiguous, we are left with the impression that the judge has slaughtered him too.

To me, "Blood Meridian" hearkens back to an earlier era of writing - to the era of Herman Melville and (to an extent) Joseph Conrad. Much of the writing is consumed by descriptions of the landscape and weather, with the characters merely traversing these settings. Dialogue is kept to a minimum, with most of the conversations being short and consisting of questions and responses. Yet, eventually, we learn about our characters, even though they are not necessarily the foreground of the picture much of the time. Extended metaphors are also a rarity (which fits with the characters of the novel who are mostly uneducated grunts). The book has a few "extended monologues" though, which remind me of Conrad's regular narrator of Marlowe. This style, then, is well-crafted and exhibits McCarthy's fantastic ability to manipulate the written word to serve his purpose, and it is evident why many critics view "Blood Meridian" as his masterpiece.

The character of Judge Holden was brutal but beautifully created. He is, among all the characters, the one who transcends the intelligence of all the others. He keeps a journal where he documents everything he comes across, trying to learn as much as he can about everything he can. He uses logic and reasoning with the rest of the gang, who are often confused by his statements. Yet, he is also an inherently evil character. It is implied repeatedly (including through his relationship with the kid) that he is a pedophile, and it is explicit that he is a child murderer and a calculated homicidal maniac. He repeatedly refers to the pervasiveness of violence throughout culture, claiming at one point (in essence) that men are not men if they have not been to war and drawn blood. To me, he represents the devil in all his deception and violence. There is even a moment when, while explaining why he documents everything he sees and does, the judge declares that the fact that anything exists without his permission and beyond his control is an insult to him - which reminds me of a passage from Milton's "Paradise Lost" (although I cannot recall the line verbatim).

The novel's ambiguous ending - with the kid's fate left unresolved - was quite a shock to me. Although much of the action of the book had been left ambiguous, I suppose I was expecting some kind of secure resolution, some sense of closure. Yet, the lack of clarity is also a fitting ending to a book which moves through a haze of uncertainty - we're never quite sure where exactly the kid came from, why he was chosen by the judge, what happens to many of the characters. The only thing we know for certain at the end is that the judge survives in all his madness (perhaps still survives, the last line suggests - adding to the impression that he is an evil beyond the earth).

One final note: although much of the action of the book is implied, most of the descriptions of locations and scenes of the book are incredibly explicit. This detail includes the slaughter, dismemberment, and scalping of several people. McCarthy's prose leaves nothing to the imagination in regards to the brutality of these based-on-reality events. This novel is not for the feint-of-heart or weak-of-stomach. I found this brutality interesting, though, in contrast with the way death is treated in most westerns (especially in film). More often than not, someone is shot with a puff of smoke and falls over stiffly. In reality, though, bodies were disfigured, ears and scalps kept as souvenirs, and conflicts were bloody and messy. McCarthy does not stray from reality, and the reader is left with a few horrific images to think about.