Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
McCarthy’s prose is often compared to Faulkner’s, and while some of that is because they’re both from the South (just like every right-handed pitcher from Stanford is automatically compared to Mike Mussina), there are definite similarities in their styles. There’s a lilting quality to many of McCarthy’s sentences, even when he defies conventional sentence structure. He can be sparse with details when it suits his purpose (the novel’s protagonist is never identified beyond “the kid”), but can also fire off a stream of seemingly minute details that in the end paint a rich picture of a scene, a character, a moment. He never descends into the sheer inscrutability that scares so many readers away from Faulkner, who was an original in many ways but who’ll always be loved and reviled most strongly for his prose.
The story revolves around the aforementioned kid, a fourteen-year-old who runs away from his father (his mother died giving birth to him) to head out west and falls in with a group of mercenaries who are hunting an outlaw named Gómez while also collecting scalps of Apaches, all under the auspices of the Mexican government. And that’s where it gets violent – ruthlessly, sociopathically so. The violence isn’t disturbing because it’s graphic – it is, somewhat – but because it’s so effortless and is achieved on so grand a scale. It is genocide writ small, and it’s made all the worse by the fact that McCarthy based it loosely on the real-life Glanton gang, using Glanton’s top lieutenant, Judge Holden, as the primary villain.
The plot didn’t pick up until I was about halfway through the book; the kid seems to take forever to fall in with Glanton/Holden’s gang, and it’s not until things start to go awry that the plot gets interesting, with the kid and Judge Holden gradually forming the central conflict that defines the last third of the book.
If you’ve got the stomach to get through several scenes of extreme – but, as TIME wrote in its summary of the book, never gratuitous – violence, then I would certainly recommend Blood Meridian to anyone who enjoys Faulkner, morality plays (even ones where the moral lines are blurred), or great American literature. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when the scalps start flying.
Keith, what are your thoughts on the theory that The Judge is Satan? With the book so filled with Old Testament language and the way The Judge speaks to The Kid, would you put any credence in this theory?
Chris, I think there’s a lot to that theory, and The Kid as Jesus has something to it as well (although the parallels are not as strong).
No, the parallels are not as strong that way…which is what makes the book maddening in many ways. McCarthy opens a door halfway–just so you can get a brief look at what lies beyond–only to slam it back in your face before you can get the whole picture.
The epic nature of this book no doubt lends itself to Biblical interpretation, but two better touchstones for Blood Meridian are Moby Dick (the idea of what the great American Novel means) and the Vietnam War (What that war really meant to America). This is a novel based on American history, and how we romanticized our past is part of McCarthey’s reason for tearing it down in such a violent manner. At the same time, this violence (as well as events) parallels the Vietnam War, which was still heavily on the minds of Americans when McCarthy was writing it. Amazing Book. If you haven’t read it already, Suttree is just as good as Blood Meredian, and it is the highlight of the Southern Gothic period of McCarthy’s writing.