Book Review: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian reads like a window into the fever dream of brutality and human suffering present in 1850s American life. There are few novelists that describe savagery and utter depravity in such concentrated doses as McCarthy does. There are long stretches of this novel where it seems that McCarthy overly praises this country's violent past (and unfortunately present) with just how often a description like, "two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire"(107) occurs, but just as it seems there is no end in sight to the gore we get a momentary reprieve like, "the shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come"(45).

Although McCarthy's writing is at all times beautiful, there isn't a moment in the novel that I would consider to be beautiful. Even when we have momentary lapses into gorgeous imagery, styling on fundamental truths of being human, etc..., the novel never escapes the foreboding sense of some horrible storm approaching. The reader feels like what I imagine one of the main characters, The Kid, feels being wrapped up and thrown into a life he doesn't have time to question or the luxury to consider in any kind of meaningful way. The Kid starts out as a main character and eases the reader into the chaotic world of the West, but as the novel Progresses he sort of fades into the background as he becomes absorbed into the gang of Indian scalpers that the book revolves around.

Every moment is undercut with morally sinister intentions, and chaotically barbaric actions of which there is no logical reason for. For example, there is a part in the novel where The Glanton gang, which is based off of a real world gang of Indian Scalpers, raids a Native American camp. The gang slaughters everyone in the camp except for a young child who is captured by the character, The Judge. For a while the Judge cares for the child, resting him on his lap and playing little games with him. But come the morning, the Judge murders the child and leaves him along with the wreckage of their destroyed camp. Its moments like this that make us pause and realize how truly savage and horrific the Glanton Gang is, and is an obvious commentary on what humanity really is at its core. Or at least the animalistic state of mind a band of scalpers must have been ruled by.

This leads me to discuss in my opinion the most interesting character of the book--The Judge. Judge Holden is an extremely tall and extremely huge man with no hair on his head; not even eyebrows. The Judge seems to know everything there is to know about the world, and collects samples of plants and other things that he sketches into a notebook he always keeps with him. Interestingly the Glanton Gang finds him sitting on a rock in the middle of the desert with no clear indication of why he was there or how he got there. This suggests The Judge to be some kind of spirit or entity of the West; a kind of embodiment of all things terrible and odious. A harbinger of war. An omen of death.

lecture about the novel : I found this lecture really helpful for trying to understand The Judge.

Here is a quote from the Judge in order to give you a better idea of this character, "Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."(198).

The Kid and the Judge are obvious foils to one another, but it isn't clear to me what elements of each other's character they are supposed to highlight. The Kid is evil, and the Judge is just kind of an advanced evil. Although with The Kid it is easier for us to sympathize because he is after all a kid, he still murders people without mercy and is part of the Glanton Gang despite whether or not he had any choice in the matter.

This book has the quality (like most fantastic works of literature) of having every sentence seem as though it relates to every idea and theme presented in the book as a whole. For example, "The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the blood beat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be"(244). I think the reason for this is because the novel at its core deals with the fundamental motivations that construct what we know as human nature. The need to survive, the urge to create and hold onto one's own identity, the battle of finding our place in this world, asking why we are here and what we are supposed to be doing. All of these questions are asked and thrown about over the course of this novel and the story forces the reader to come to their own conclusions because like all great literature, the answers aren't found in it's pages, only more questions.