- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Picador; 5 edition (3 Aug 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330312561
- ISBN-13: 978-0330312561
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (105 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 23,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Blood Meridian
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Product Description
Review
Cormac McCarthy is now the greatest American novelist --The Times<br /><br />It's 1849 and the 14-year-old nameless "kid" has drifted into the violent life of an outlaw band of bloodthirsty Indian hunters on the Texas-Mexico borders. Grotesque characters play out their roles against an unforgiving landscape. The understated southern drawl is just right, suggesting the symbolic richness of McCarthy's language. --Rachel Redford, The Observer
Voiced here with slow deliberation, the nightmarishly enigmatic Judge - a man who declares he feels the personal freedom of birds as a personal insult - is a presence I'm finding horribly difficult to shake. --Bella Todd, Time Out
Having thought that no book could ever be as harrowing or as frightening as McCarthy's apocalyptic Pulitzer prize-winning The Road (I finished it at 3am sitting up in bed with the light on), here's an even bleaker story about man's inhumanity to man. It's set in the familiar Tex-Mex territory of All the Pretty Horses, his best book, and its hero, the kid, like John Grady Cole, is a 16-year-old drifter who pretty much lives in the saddle. There, alas, the resemblance ends this is definitely not a love story. It's an allegory about survival, lawlessness and natural justice. The kid, who's been living, scavenging, fighting, killing, surviving on his own since he was 12, heads for the Apache wars circa 1840 in the legendary Wild West and joins a troop of mercenaries paid in gold for Indian scalps. The battle scenes are absolutely terrifying. Bullets, arrows, decapitated heads flying, the braves daubed with war paint, some naked, some wearing the looted clothing of their victims US army jackets, whalebone corsets and ruffled shirts the Americans by now so blood-crazed and inured to violence that they massacre Indians, Mexican peons and peaceful settlers indiscriminately. McCarthy's prose is compelling, a potent mix of stark and lyrical: The night sky lies so spread with stars that there is scarcely space for black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. The little prairie wolves cry all night and dawn finds him in the grassy draw where he'd gone to hide from the wind. The hobbled mule stands over him and watches the east for light. The sun that rises is the colour of steel, his mounted shadow falls for miles before him. Brilliant, but not for the faint-hearted. --Sue Arnold, The Guardian --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
Voiced here with slow deliberation, the nightmarishly enigmatic Judge - a man who declares he feels the personal freedom of birds as a personal insult - is a presence I'm finding horribly difficult to shake. --Bella Todd, Time Out
Having thought that no book could ever be as harrowing or as frightening as McCarthy's apocalyptic Pulitzer prize-winning The Road (I finished it at 3am sitting up in bed with the light on), here's an even bleaker story about man's inhumanity to man. It's set in the familiar Tex-Mex territory of All the Pretty Horses, his best book, and its hero, the kid, like John Grady Cole, is a 16-year-old drifter who pretty much lives in the saddle. There, alas, the resemblance ends this is definitely not a love story. It's an allegory about survival, lawlessness and natural justice. The kid, who's been living, scavenging, fighting, killing, surviving on his own since he was 12, heads for the Apache wars circa 1840 in the legendary Wild West and joins a troop of mercenaries paid in gold for Indian scalps. The battle scenes are absolutely terrifying. Bullets, arrows, decapitated heads flying, the braves daubed with war paint, some naked, some wearing the looted clothing of their victims US army jackets, whalebone corsets and ruffled shirts the Americans by now so blood-crazed and inured to violence that they massacre Indians, Mexican peons and peaceful settlers indiscriminately. McCarthy's prose is compelling, a potent mix of stark and lyrical: The night sky lies so spread with stars that there is scarcely space for black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. The little prairie wolves cry all night and dawn finds him in the grassy draw where he'd gone to hide from the wind. The hobbled mule stands over him and watches the east for light. The sun that rises is the colour of steel, his mounted shadow falls for miles before him. Brilliant, but not for the faint-hearted. --Sue Arnold, The Guardian --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
Product Description
Cormac McCarthy's violent lyric masterpiece
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
48 of 53 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"Blood Meridian", based on real events, charts the bloody adventures of a group of scalp-hunters in the west a century and a half ago.
The extreme (and random) violence of the novel's many gore-infested passages is too much for many stomachs, but then again life in all its raw honesty often is. Ironically for a novel dealing mainly with death and desolation, the finely-honed prose cascades and sparks off the page like a Catherine wheel, literally taking this reader's breath away.
Throughout, the novel is bestrode by the looming figure of Judge Holden, awesome and terrible, all-knowing yet uncaring, omnipotent and omnipresent, an 1850s reworking of the devil.
Read this novel for the stark beauty of its prose, read it for the terror created by the graphic descriptions of the violence man can - and does - commit on man, read it for the surprising amount of dry, laconic humour in the dialogue, read it to discover the Judge, one of literature's great creations. But read it.
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I had never read McCarthy but picked up this book along with "The Road" due to all the Hype from the Oprah book club selection. While the "The Road" is a very good book it is not the masterpiece of "Blood Meridian." This is the most powerful books I have ever read. McCarthy's style is highlighted here: sharp, dry, brittle, and panoramic. I was enraptured by how McCarthy was able to capture the imagery of the southwest landscape with his words. The story itself is horrific, epic, and yet commonplace, the conquering of the west and its people by the whiteman has been better illustrated. On top of all this McCarthy is a grand story teller, who can stretch the limits of imagination without losing the common touch-in other words he keeps it REAL. This is a challenge, but worthy one!
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Those with weak stomachs need not open the pages of this book. From beginning to end, this is one long travail of unadulterated gore and brutality. It's major mythic character, the Judge, states that war is divine, that nothing on the earth is beyond his notice or does not require his permission to die. And brutal, violent death occurs with great regularity within this book, every couple of pages or so.
The setting is the West and Mexico around the period of 1847, and the license to kill without discrimination is enabled by the Judge's charter of killing and scalping renegade Indians for bounty. If that was all that this group did, perhaps the reader could make some allowance for the portrayed actions, but it quickly becomes apparent that anyone is a target, regardless of guilt, innocence, age, occupation, race, gender, or prior actions. The book becomes a dark celebration of violence for violence's sake.
The Kid, fourteen years old at the start of this book, is the nominal protagonist, drawn into the Judge's group mainly because he had nothing better to do, without other skills or any ambitions. And he is practically the only ray of light within this whole concoction, as he (once or twice) actually shows a little feeling for persons besides himself.
The Judge is an enigmatic super-something, ageless, multilingual, educated, interested in ecology, and much larger than life. Who (or what) the Judge is is clearly central to this book's theme, but he certainly can stand as an avatar of an element of human nature that most people would rather not think about.
McCarthy's prose is very distinct, with odd syntax, unquoted dialogue, and considerable use of some rather rare words. His descriptions of the country are, in some places, nearly prose poems. But this style also leads to what I think is the major flaw with this book, as he never gets inside the heads of any of his characters, remains distant, such that none of his people ever came `alive' to me. Some descriptions of the privations the group experiences while crossing a desert, while quite accurate, remained something happening to a group of stick figures, rather than recognizable humans. Perhaps this is exactly what he wanted, written more as an allegory or parable than any conventional type of story. Certainly there isn't any real plot, as the story careens from one brutal incident to the next.
Perhaps this book can best be described as an archetypal anti-Western, the antithesis of the standard Western, which, amid all the violence, has its focus on heroes. There are no heroes here.
---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
The setting is the West and Mexico around the period of 1847, and the license to kill without discrimination is enabled by the Judge's charter of killing and scalping renegade Indians for bounty. If that was all that this group did, perhaps the reader could make some allowance for the portrayed actions, but it quickly becomes apparent that anyone is a target, regardless of guilt, innocence, age, occupation, race, gender, or prior actions. The book becomes a dark celebration of violence for violence's sake.
The Kid, fourteen years old at the start of this book, is the nominal protagonist, drawn into the Judge's group mainly because he had nothing better to do, without other skills or any ambitions. And he is practically the only ray of light within this whole concoction, as he (once or twice) actually shows a little feeling for persons besides himself.
The Judge is an enigmatic super-something, ageless, multilingual, educated, interested in ecology, and much larger than life. Who (or what) the Judge is is clearly central to this book's theme, but he certainly can stand as an avatar of an element of human nature that most people would rather not think about.
McCarthy's prose is very distinct, with odd syntax, unquoted dialogue, and considerable use of some rather rare words. His descriptions of the country are, in some places, nearly prose poems. But this style also leads to what I think is the major flaw with this book, as he never gets inside the heads of any of his characters, remains distant, such that none of his people ever came `alive' to me. Some descriptions of the privations the group experiences while crossing a desert, while quite accurate, remained something happening to a group of stick figures, rather than recognizable humans. Perhaps this is exactly what he wanted, written more as an allegory or parable than any conventional type of story. Certainly there isn't any real plot, as the story careens from one brutal incident to the next.
Perhaps this book can best be described as an archetypal anti-Western, the antithesis of the standard Western, which, amid all the violence, has its focus on heroes. There are no heroes here.
---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Dazzling masterpiece
It is not easy to find the adjectives to describe this coruscating work of artistic brilliance.
It takes a while to get into, but by page 20 you will be hooked. Read more
It takes a while to get into, but by page 20 you will be hooked. Read more
Published 9 days ago by atalanta88
The Horror of the Old West
The dreadful journey of the Kid, a boy thrust into the lawless and amoral man's world of the Old West as it really was under the monstrous eye of Judge Holden, one of the most... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Jackyd101
The best 'Western' ever written!
This has to be the best'Western' ever written and probabbly McCarthy's crowning glory. I'm not going to go into loads of detail, as nothing should spoil this book for the reader. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Pablo
I'm a big fan of Cormac, but not this...
I was really looking forward to reading this book, I have previously read nearly all of McCarthy's novels and really enjoyed them. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Bridgey
The best novel ever?
This is the most powerful and memorable novel I have ever read. The writing is beautiful. Just looking at the cover draws me back into the world the author has so vividly created. Read more
Published 5 months ago by News book
Didn't Like It and Here's Why
"Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy has an interesting and exciting concept, the characters are nicely drawn and each of them very enticing. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Max Watt
Disappointing
I was really looking forward to reading this book after seeing all the rave reviews on here. I even found some recommendations on a few internet book forums. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Fishstick
Quite simply, one of the most stunning books every written.
I'd already read the The Road and No Country for Old Men when I decided to use Amazon.co.uk to purchase what in my humble, moderately educated opinion is the most stunning piece of... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Mr. Lj Urquhart
Uncomparable.
I think it has all been said. Great book, amazing language and prose. Takes you back in time and adds a new dimension to the expression, 'Wild West'. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Linda Johnston
How the West was Won
A wild ride in the desert following a greedy criminal and a demon with a knack for twisting truth and lies. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Rizzo Loris
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