Blood Meridian: or The Evening Redness in the West [Paperback]

My book jacket says BLOOD MERIDIAN "...chronicles the extraordinary violence of the Glanton Gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians." Wikipedia adds that John Glanton "led a gang of scalp hunters. Nominally a mercenary operation hired by Mexican authorities to track down and kill dangerous bands of Apaches, the gang began murdering and scalping non-Apaches and massacring citizens..." and were eventually "declared outlaws."

McCarthy's entry to the Glanton gang comes through two characters. The first is the Kid, who joins up in his mid-teens and participates in its gruesome crimes. The second is Judge Holden, who dominates the gang and has a philosophical view of its random violence.

In McCarthy's hands, the story of the Glanton gang is like a psychopathic road novel, which is held together with genius-quality poetic writing. Read BM and be captured by McCarthy's immense talent as the gang traverses the Southwest and northern Mexico. I open BM at random (the start of Chapter 14) and find:

"All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker and in the night they could hear the drum of rain miles away on the prairie. They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the horses like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal of the harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of the guns. Mad jackhares started and checked in the blue glare and high among those clanging crags jokin roehawks crouched in their feathers or cracked a yellow eye at the thunder underfoot."

The writing is truly amazing.

At the same time, McCarthy uses the Judge to move his narrative beyond gruesome and episodic adventure. Here, the Judge seems to create and sustain a mission of violence for the gang. And when a character temporarily operates outside the gang and the Judge's influence? Then society quickly challenges and usually contains him. (In fact, only the kid is able to avoid self-destruction outside the gang, which provokes a final act of viciousness by the judge.)

Anyway, BM makes terrible (not just aesthetic) sense after the Judge emerges as a force that makes greater violence possible. And in the final chapter, McCarthy's treatment of the slaughter of the American buffalo reminds us that the violence of the Glanton gang and its willingness to massacre lurks in the nature of many men, simply awaiting sanction and leadership.

Two quick final points:

First, I encourage readers who enjoyed BM to try Pynchon's Against the Day. This shares a character (Sloat) and also has traverse motion in the Southwest and Mexico, albeit in family form. But in AtD, the violence is personal and capitalistic, not epic, while the narrative, in its Western thread, is sweet and magical parody.

Second: Have your dictionary ready. McCarthy is the master of the short and obscure word. Heading my long list: affray, swale, sprent, sutler, farrier, vadose, kivas, spalls...

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)

"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.