Senseless violence viewed as the driver of all human destiny in a shocking Wild West setting

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	• Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Modern Library) Cormac McCarthy Modern Library, 2001 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 289 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Great Writer Unfortunately Defined by What He Left Out

McCarthy is not for everyone. The violence of Blood Meridien is graphic and pervasive, but is also cold and emotionless, and it dehumanizes many of the characters. I found no dark humor here, only darkness, but not evil. Of course there are evil acts perpetrated by nearly everyone McCarthy chose to include as a character and those who don't are either killed before they have a chance, or shown as fools to juxtapose the reality of western expansion of the United States. So the question that arises is "why?"

McCarthy based this book on real events, the participation of the eradication of the indigenous population of North America by scalp hunters paid by the Mexican government to track down and kill Indians, the scalps serving as receipts to prove that Indians had been killed. When caught by Indians, the scalphunters suffered the same fate and worse at the hands of their intended prey, which left a river of blood in the wake of these marauding bands. McCarthy's point here is to destroy the romanticism of how the West was won that has supplanted the reality of genocide and ruthless destruction. The West was won by an almost unimaginable amount of killing, Indian and buffalo alike, by our ancestors, and McCarthy wanted to write a book about how and why people ended up doing this, and wipe out the hideous mythology of sentimental and delusional western hacks like Louis L'Amour. At this he succeeds brilliantly. No one who reads this book should ever think of the American West of the 19th Century in the same way again.

Part of what drives the book and its characters is the love of war by some, and the acceptance of war by others. The relevance to our current foreign policy situation is even more startling than when McCarthy wrote the book in the 80s.

McCarthy's wordcraft is everything it's hyped to be. There aren't many writers working today who can craft descriptions of the landscape with as much compelling wonder and detail. One section early in the book, a long, unpunctuated description of a band of men attacked by Commanches, stands as far as I'm concerned with some of the greatest literary achievements in history, Hamlet's soliloquy, the last few pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the opening scenes of The Sound and the Fury, the death of Joe Christmas in Light in August, chapter 4 of V, Joyce's The Dead, just to name a few off the top of my head.

Yet there was something missing from this book that weakened it for me. It is a great book, but not a perfect book, and that is because McCarthy has no use for women. Even in scenes with women, they are tossed aside as unimportant. This is a book about men, he leaves no doubt, but he never even for a moment speaks of sensuality, need, and desire, and despite his wilingness to describe violence in lurid detail, his view of the human experince remains myopic. He barely mentions sex, and refuses to detail it despite his chances to. Graphic violence is everywhere, these are men passionate about their killing, yet their sex lives are so glossed over or ignored they stop seeming like men. One could imagine a band of robots sitting in for the men in this book because it is bereft of the most human of desires. This huge absence left me sad because I wanted to really love this book, and love this writer, but he is so ensconced in masculinity and unable to even approach the female side of his male characters, let alone the females characters, and the mens' needs for them, that ultimately I was put off. Blood Meridien could have stood as an example of the great American novel, but instead it stands as a brilliant near-miss, a great book that missed its chance to be the greatest, letting itself be defined by this failure. As an example of being able to encompass violence and sensuality, I feel I know what I'm talking about, thusly: Mad God

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peckinpaugh/falukner

To live in Cormac McCarthy's world is to know death in all its manifestations: from nature and wolves to human acts of evil or necessity, when good men do bad things to survive. Blood Meridian was high noon for this. A psychotic dream across the page - Sam Peckinpah meets William Faulkner - it felt more like lava than language.

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Senseless violence viewed as the driver of all human destiny in a shocking Wild West setting

Around 1850, a gang of Americans roamed the U.S.-Mexico border. The Mexican government had contracted them to hunt down the Apaches and bring scalps back as proof, but the "Glangton gang" ended up ravishing innocent villages, robbing the inhabitants and scalping them instead. This episode forms the basis of Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel BLOOD MERIDIAN: Or the Evening Redness in the West, which reminds the modern world that American expansion into the West was violent indeed, and it makes the further point that this era was only one outbreak of a perennial human disposition to violence.

The protagonist of BLOOD MERIDIAN is a 14 year-old young known only as "The Kid", a runaway from Tennessee who arrives in Texas and immediately becomes familiar with senseless murder and mayhem. I've encountered few protagonists in literature like McCarthy's, for the Kid observes everything around him in great detail, including piercing insight into the hearts of the men he rides us, yet we get little idea of what the Kid himself is thinking. The novel's antagonist is the mysterious Judge Holden. In accounts of the Glanton gang, the Judge was a pale man with some education behind him, Glanton's right hand man. In McCarthy's novel, however, he becomes a demonic figure, albino and ageless, discoursing at great length about Man and his place in the world while engaging in the basest brutality, and seemingly much more in charge of things than the crazed Glanton.

Some earlier reviewers have taken exception with McCarthy's diction and punctuation. Certainly the success of his recent two novels (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THE ROAD), which are written in a lighter vein, have brought to BLOOD MERIDIAN many readers which are not familiar with more arty prose stylings. However, the lack of punctuation marks should pose no challenge, especially if you have read novels in other languages where dialogue is minimally marked. Some of his sentences are contorted run-ons, this was no doubt carefully calculated to give the book a folksy tone, appropriate for a book whose protagonist can't read and the culture he inhabits is still very much an oral one. Finally, I really can't understand the claim that BLOOD MERIDIAN forces one to pick up a dictionary and look up hundreds of new words. McCarthy's language is poetical, but far from obscurantist.

If you decide to get BLOOD MERIDIAN, I recommend the Modern Library edition, which is in hardback and has much better paper than the Vintage paperback. It only goes for a couple of bucks more, too.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

"The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and Faulkner," writes esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom in his Introduction to the Modern Library edition. "I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable."

Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical West, one so fiercely realized that since its initial publication in 1985 the canon of American literature has welcomed Blood Meridian to its shelf.

"A classic American novel of regeneration through violence," declares Michael Herr. "McCarthy can only be compared to our greatest writers."

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