REVIEW: 'Blood Meridian: The Evening Sky in the West' by Cormac McCarthy

There are perhaps a few songs which, upon first hearing, have never left you. Perhaps, like me, they led to fundamental changes not just in your music listening habits but in your appreciation of art, and maybe even to the extent of how you lived your life. You can remember the place, the time, the feeling of the music, the before and after.

Picture this: I¡¯m 16 years old, in my neighbour¡¯s house, listening to ¡°Smells Like Teen Spirt¡± by Nirvana for the first time. At that time, I was a big metal fan. After hearing this song, my tastes changed, just like that. Perhaps the same can be said of books, paintings, or experiences, both good and bad. Indelible marks are left, there is a before and an after, perceptions and senses are altered, nothing is ever really the same again.

It is common knowledge that most of these experiences occur when we are younger. I first read the novel ¡°Crime and Punishment¡± when I was 18. Dostoyevsky¡¯s novel was a pivotal point in the development of my capacity to understand what a novel could do and how it could break open unexplored territories, of which I had inklings but did not know how to give them forms, let alone words.

So, when ¡°Blood Meridian¡±, Cormac McCarthy¡¯s opus, which I first read in my mid-40s, jolted me out of my comfort zone and into a new world of artistic possibility, I was very pleasantly surprised. Like many of the great books I have read, I discovered it quite by accident. Browsing one day on the fifth floor of the library in XJTLU looking for some light, nice reading ¨C ¡°Blood Meridian¡± is as far from nice and light as it¡¯s possible to go ¨C I came across it hidden away in a literal dark corner. I¡¯d heard of Cormac McCarthy and had seen the dramatisations of his works into movies: ¡°No Country for Old Men¡± and ¡°The Road¡±. I had even, a long time ago, read one of his earlier novels, but it didn¡¯t do much for me at that time. Having always been a huge fan of Westerns, the title and blurb on the back straightaway caught my interest.

Photo portrait of American author Cormac McCarthy used as the first-edition back cover of his 1973 novel ¡°Child of God¡±. Credit: David Styles – Public domain

McCarthy loosely based ¡°Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West¡±, to give it its full title, on the activities of the Glanton gang, a bunch of murderous scalp hunters, who were in operation in southern Texas and Mexico in the mid-19th century. What we know about the gang today comes mainly from a book published by Samuel E Chamberlain,?¡°My Confession¡±, a man who rode with and was part of the gang. McCarthy¡¯s extensive studies of Chamberlain¡¯s detailed notes and precise sketches of the landscapes through which they travelled influenced the novel. They led directly to the creation of Judge Holden (based on Chamberlain himself), the novel¡¯s antagonist, claimed by the great American critic Harold Bloom to be the most diabolical character in all of American fiction.

Bloom goes on to say that ¡°Blood Meridian¡± is the second greatest American novel, a masterpiece of writing, the first being ¡°Moby Dick¡±, to which it has many similarities in terms of the Biblical language (King James version) both contain, and the wandering (almost non-existent) plot line. In ¡°Blood Meridian¡± the beast is not a huge white whale but rather a seven-foot tall completely hairless Judge Holden who generally appears comparable to the figure of Satan in?¡°Paradise Lost¡±, insofar as Satan¡¯s evil consists in the boundlessness of his desire for power and knowledge.

It should be noted here that ¡°Blood Meridian¡± is not for the faint-hearted. Bloom attempted the novel three times before he could finish it. The violence is extreme and does not flinch from the place and time that was the Wild West in the 19th century. Countries are not born of peace. Men have evil in their hearts (there are no female characters in this story), and this evil lurks surprisingly close to the surface. There are no good guys in this novel, except perhaps the protagonist, simply known as ¡°the kid¡±, an illiterate 14-year-old who stumbles into the path of the gang. ¡°The kid¡± having a propensity, a talent, and a taste for mindless violence, flourishes among them, yet he remains not wholly corrupted. The gang consists of, amongst others, Glanton, the haunted leader; the tattooed and earless Toadvine; the ex-priest Tobin; David Brown, who killed another member of the gang with the same name; and Batchat, who wears a necklace of human ears.

The quality of the writing is sublime. This strange juxtaposition of the beauty of language and the terrible world this language is describing enthrals me each time I read it. In the hands of a lesser writer, this delicate and difficult balance might have been doomed, but McCarthy achieves pitch perfection. I have, to date, read it twice, listened to it twice on audiobook and have yet to find an incongruous word, a sentence which does not fit. Anybody with a love for language should read ¡°Blood Meridian¡±, and anybody seriously concerned with metaphysical questions about the nature of God, morality, violence and indeed the nature of evil in one¡¯s own soul should read ¡°Blood Meridian¡±. That is not to say that the book makes moral judgements. This is high art; the lines between prose, poetry, and philosophy are blurred, and high art, by its definition, refrains from judgements. It is both as frightening and beautiful as the landscape it describes, laden with deep philosophical nuggets, interwoven in dialogues with wretched characters on the brink of life and death.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the Judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way. ¨C ?¡°Blood Meridian: The Evening Sky in the West¡± by Cormac McCarthy

Critics may point to the absence of any discernible plot, to the repetitive descriptions of this unchanging landscape. It would be interesting to count the number of times the sentence? ¡°They rode on¡± appears in the novel. But that¡¯s just it, they did ride on, and on and on and on into that unforgiving, bloodthirsty and unchanging landscape. Many point to the absence of hope in the novel and they are not wrong. Acts of kindness, moments that display the pathos of human existence, are few if there are any. And yet, there is beauty. There is beauty in the rocks, in the desert sands, in the death of a horse, in the evening redness in the west, in the Judge¡¯s deliberations, in his speeches concerning the great mass of stars that is their nightly ceiling.

It is interesting to note that when it was first released in 1986, ¡°Blood Meridian¡± received lukewarm critical acclaim and very little commercial success. It is now considered one of the greatest American novels. Multiple unsuccessful attempts have been made to turn it into a film.

I have never read a book like ¡°Blood Meridian¡±. I don¡¯t believe I will again read one quite like it. To leave you with three words that hint at its essence: unique, terrifying and beautiful would be more accurate and efficient than the thousand I have so far used. All I can say is – read it; only then will you know what I mean.

Cormac McCarthy’s House Credit: Peter Josyph – Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0