Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West (Picador Books) (Paperback)

"The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning."

"They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague."

This latter passage perhaps an allegory-within-an-allegory.

The characters which populate this tale seem like ciphers to the grander themes of free-will and determinism, currents of which run through the novel with implacable force. The individual and his will is painted small against a backdrop of deserts and mountains ever shimmering to the horizon and these in turn baulk before the unreckonable cosmos beyond.

"They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the night skies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite"

Cosmos and chaos are central themes here. Glanton and his gang blaze a bloody trail through the ever-reddening west, seemingly unstoppable in their bloodlust. But there is a higher order to their hazardous mayhem. A commentator on the society that has arisen from this uncivil civilization, Douglas Coupland, has said "If something appears to be random it's because you are standing too close to a very big pattern".

And above all this towers the character of the Judge. "The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element". The judge is the only character to survive this epoch and indeed any other. The temporal aspect of American history and indeed our understanding of the universe itself is subverted by the judge. Throughout the events detailed in the book the judge is present, sometimes it would seem - and one is never sure of this - in several places at the same time. The judge has the power to revise the history which has preceded him, recording in his notebook a version which is expedient to the moment and to the future that, in his hand is "antic clay".

The reader is never far from passages of breathtaking beauty or stomach-rending barbarism. "Blood Meridian" pulls no punches and moves seamlessly from aweful descriptions of a primaeval landscape to awful accounts of medieval bloodletting. The attack by Comanches is actually terrifying and one almost finds oneself faced with this "legion of horribles, hundreds in number...bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies.".

I don't think plot is important to this novel. Plot is determined by the actions of characters; Blood Meridian is driven by some greater force that will make you question the agencies that shape our small lives and the times in which we live. It is a true allegory for troubled times, set in troubled times. Read this book and then read it again. I have hesitated to call this the Best Book Ever Written, but I've yet to read anything which comes close and I'll be surprised if anything surpasses in my small lifetime.

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.