Blood Meridian (1985) - Cormac McCarthy - Overrated?

 

Cormac McCarthy is said to be one of the best authors ever produced in America, and Blood Meridian is said to be his finest novel. The man’s prose has been compared to that of  both Faulkner and  Hemingway, as different as those two styles are. The influence of both men on McCarthy is readily evident in Blood Meridian, as is the prose style utilized in the Old Testament and in Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s all there, and that’s what made Blood Meridian such a difficult read for me.

The back cover of this 25th Anniversary Edition  describes the novel this way:

“Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian is an epic novel that traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world in which the market for Indian scalps is thriving."

And that does pretty much sum up this rather plotless novel. 

Once the Kid throws in with the Glanton gang, he rides from massacre to massacre gathering scalps to be sold for the bounty offered by the Mexican governors of Chihuahua and Sonora. At first only hostile Indians are attacked, but when no more hostiles are to be found, the gang wipes out a peaceful village populated by the peaceful Tigua Indian tribe. Even that doesn’t satisfy the bloodlust and greed of the gang, so they turn to wiping out small Mexican villages and mining camps - and passing off the scalps of their victims as having been taken from hostile Indians. Any encounter with the Glanton gang is guaranteed to be a violent one, and no one south of the border is safe from them.

There are a few notable characters in the gang, including its leader John Glanton and the Kid, but the most memorable of them all is a huge, hairless philosopher simply called the Judge. The Judge starts out as Glanton’s right-hand man but soon develops such a powerful influence and hold on Glanton, that it is really the Judge who dictates the gang’s downward spiral. Without his presence, it is likely enough that the gang would never have devolved into the nightmarish death machine that it became. The Judge is all-powerful, and McCarthy by making all characters so secondary to him, emphasizes his dominance. 

It was for stylistic reasons - not for the abundance of extreme violence and cruelty on display - that I found Blood Meridian to be such a difficult book to finish. Cleverly, McCarthy surrounds the sudden flashes of violence and bloodletting with much longer sections of mind-numbing travel and terrain descriptions. This gives the reader a feeling very similar to what the gang experiences between its murderous raids. Much of that prose reads like a cross between Faulkner and the authors of the Old Testament, and as beautiful as it probably is, it is still quite a chore to read a dozen or so straight pages of it before something else finally “happens.”

This one sentence is typical of that kind of writing:

“They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwariors pendant form their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.” 

So do I personally think Blood Meridian is one of the best American novels of all time? No, not by a long shot. For such a violent book, it feels very repetitive. Even the violence, which is at first is so shocking, loses its punch after a while, and the story really is just one of a gang riding around committing one atrocity after another. None of the characters, including the Judge and the Kid, are developed well enough to make them seem particularly real, and there is no big payoff at the end of the novel to make me feel that it was all worth the effort of working my way through McCarthy’s almost impenetrable prose.

(From what I understand, Blood Meridian rates high on the list of “novels started but not finished,” so I do get a tiny sense of satisfaction for having finished it on my first attempt - unlike the half-dozen or so tries it took me to get through Moby Dick. So there’s that.)