Customer Reviews

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

5 star:		(117)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I recently saw Harold Bloom, the famous literary scholar from Yale, on a television show where he stated that Blood Meridian was the greatest work of any contemporary American author. I agree. I can't think of anything I've read that even comes close to this novel. First, you have the prose style, which is so controlled and crafted and at the same time flows so naturally that it must have taken years to develop. It reminded me of a missing book from the bible: hypnotic, enigmatic, ancient and at the same time, familiar. I kept thinking of the ocean when I was reading it because of the vastness of the landscape he describes. It seems as if the characters are on a journey, but they're not, unless they're circling further and further down into hell.

I think the familiarity of the novel comes from it's relation to violence from a Christian standpoint. There's no doubt that McCarthy intends to have us react to this book from a moral perspective and yet at the same time be fascinated with it's violence. The setting, the wild wicked west, is a part of the American psyche that still takes forms today in our action films and tv shows that feed our hunger for blood and murder. By taking us back to our roots, stripping away the restraints of our Judeo-Christian values, MCCarthy steeps the story of death and evil in biblical prose and washes it with blood so that we see our dark selves reflected in all our ugliness.

I compare this work to the works of the great Russian novelists ,Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who always went for the big questions, What is life?, Who is God?, What is morality? and the American Moby Dick which encapsulated a universe. When you read books like these a lot of what appears on the bestseller lists seems so meaningless.

This is a book you simply stand in awe of if you're a writer or ever thought of being one.

McCarthy writes in such beautiful, abstract, and often confusing, images. I've never encountered a prose so close to verse in all my years, as if many of the passages through BLOOD MERIDIAN could be lifted directly from some of the more dark, free verse of Eliot or Williams.

And never have I witness something so gruesome and visceral and completely unfaltering in terms of chaos.

This book is something magical, has a pitch-perfect ending, and some of the greatest characters.

the judge dances

Widely considered to be McCarthy's masterpiece, Blood Meridian explores the same themes which reached a wide audience in his more recent works The Road and No Country for Old Men (Vintage International), both adapted for the screen in recent years. McCarthy presents a world of chaos, violence, and inhumanity, a bleak landscape peopled by mercenaries, malice, and violence. But just as his desolate vision and descriptions of the horrific violence which characterized the much mythicized "Old West" are interspersed with expertly rich and poetic language, what at first appears to be a cynical and wholly amoral worldview holds something deeper nestled within.

The book follows the fictionalized exploits of the historical Glanton gang, a group of mercenaries hired to kill Apache Indians in Mexico after the Mexican-American wa. Throughout the book stands the enigmatic and frightening character of Judge Holden, who many reviewers see as the personification of evil and perhaps the Devil himself. While the Biblical tone of the book definitely suggests this interpretation, McCarthy is as always saying something about the very real manifestations of evil in a world often viewed through rose-colored glasses. Holden is in fact a typical, if exceptional, psychopath. He is ruthless, remorseless, intelligent and malicious. He is larger than life and embodies the psychopathic worldview. (See Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us and Political Ponerology for more on the worldview of the psychopath.)

Interestingly, McCarthy associates Holden with science and law. In Holden's hands both become tools of self-glorification bereft of any human feeling, the law simply a means to win, and science a means to conquer nature. But within the Holden-dominated landscape of the West, is the kid. Born under the Leonids, he is the only character with the seeds of a conscience, and even these are hidden and unexpressed in the majority of the book. And as the events build up to the famous ferry massacre, we learn that these very qualities are those which Holden seeks to destroy.

Just as in The Road and No Country, McCarthy shows us, in his own inimitable style, the realities of life in this world. The dance of war is recurring, and now, just as then, the philosophy of psychopathy is the dominant ideology. And yet within this reality, conscience still lives. It is fragile, yet it persists. It is often destroyed and defeated, but it is what keeps us together and makes us human in an inhuman world. It is the fire that we hold inside, sheltered against the cold dark of "the world inside the devil."

"The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid, like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear."

Based on historical sources, written in an Old Testament style all its own, laced with gallows humor, synchronized with stellar and cosmological references, aglow with bright literary references to Melville's MOBY DICK and Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. It has been highly praised by such diverse literary figures as Harold Bloom, Stephen King, Donna Tartt, Steve Hamilton, and Madison Smartt Bell. To get some inkling of the brilliance of this novel, see John Sepich's NOTES ON BLOOD MERIDIAN or go to the Cormac McCarthy website.

It took me a while but I finally finished and loved this book. I'll admit I spent some time looking up the definitions to some words but I don't think you can read this without using a dictionary....unless you're a genius or lying.

Extremely graphic and difficult at times but well worth it. It's striking how his current writing pales in comparison. This must have taken a long time to write wheras NCFOM must have taken him an hour. I still enjoyed NCFOM but it wasn't nearly as fulfilling. It'll be interesting to how Blood Meridian turns out as a film. At one time you wouldn't think it'd be possible to make such a violent film but now it seems anything goes and violence sells.

It is actually immaterial that the book is based on "actual events". Shakespeare's history plays emerge from circumstance but transmute those circumstances by a use of language which compels us to tread an alien landscape, attentive to its
details if we wish to come through it.

To merely deride this work's language, in the dismissive way
of some reviewers ( "pretentious") does not meet the challenge
McCarthy set for himself in writing this work.

If a professor read these words in a student's paper he would know that he was reading the words of a transfiguring author:

Now wolves had come to follow them, great pale lobos with yellow eyes that trotted neat of foot or squatted in the shimmering heat to watch them where they made their noon halt. Moving on again. Loping, sidling, ambling with their long noses
to the ground. In the evening their eyes shifted and winked out there on the edge of the firelight and in the morning when the riders rode out in the cool dark they could hear the snarling and the pop of their mouths behind them as they sacked the camp for meatscraps."

or

"They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with he dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god."

Note, I have deliberately not chosen climactic moments to
provide evidence of McCarthy's power and originality.

Note that the Judge delivers soliliquies that are memorable in
their impossibility: does anyone imagine that Richard III spoke
as Shakespeare had him speak? Listen to the Judge:

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order
in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.
For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

There is dialogue too. It is often curt when contrasted with the Judge's speeches. But the dialogue is revelatory of character; trace the ex-priest's words with the kid. Read the kid talking with Sproule after the "legion of horribles"
destroys Captain White's command and these two survivors pause
in their escape:

What do you want to do?said the kid.
Get a drink of water.
Other than that.
I don't know.
You want to try and head back?
To Texas?
I don't know where else.
We'd never make it.
Well you say.
I ain't got no say.
He was coughing again. He held his chest with his good hand and sat as if he'd get his breath.
What have you got, a cold?
I got consumption.
Consumption?
He nodded. I came out here for my health.

The work coheres. It is a rich source of discussion and contemplation about man.

In closing, I will point to something about the judge which I have not seen cited in these reviews: is it not interesting that the Judge, a scalp-hunter, is entirely hairless?
Has nature construed a personage who cannot be scalped?
Or one who thereby needs scalps?

The only reason I have given this book 5 stars is because the option to give it more was not available.

Just an excellent work. Cormac McCarthy will be remembered as one of the most important American writers of the late 20th century.

At first the style of writing takes some getting use to. But when you find your rhythm for reading the prose, it's actually quite beautiful.
Of course this isn't for everyone. Incredibly violent. Hard to read and digest for most. Off-putting style for others.
But an important work from a uniquely talented writer.
I must admit, I loved reading the violence and the Judge's discourse about the beastly nature of man and his propensity for evil. He is one of the iconic figures in literature in my opinion. If he was a real person, he would be someone to truly fear.
A half-mad genius with a mind for violence that has absolutely no conscience.
Then again, he can be taken as a supernatural figure. A demon, a wraith. An embodiment of the evil of man.
This should be required reading for college literature classes.

This, I must say, is one of the best book I have ever read.I read this two years ago when I was 15 and couldn't believe what a great writer McCarthy was. Since then, McCarthy has become one of my favorite authors. In this book, from the first sentence to the last, you're drawn into it.

I liked it so much I asked my daddy get it for me for Christmas. It's a great Western of the journey of a lone kid and the people and things he comes across. For those of you who aren't into (or just don't understand) very descriptive, very meaningful, and very deep writing, then this probably isn't for you. Though, if you are a dreamer with a love for great writing, like me, you'll thoroughly enjoy this book.

I'll keep it simple here. McCarthy is a poet - his language is superb. One line from this book I'll never forget, describing the Commanches: '......a legion of horribles'. I've read every book this man has written and I have only one complaint - he hasn't published anything in a long time.