What a disappointment. A lot of people rave about how Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is the darkest, the most disturbing, the most awful, the most evil, and the best novel ever written. I had high expectations going into this one. What I got was barely more compelling than an amusement park haunted house.
The book starts off alright. We get introduced to the Kid. Actually, “introduced” might not be the right word since so little is said about him that he doesn’t actually feel like a literary character. But he leaves his family in Tennessee. We know he’s violent and that’s about all. His initial encounter with another character is with Toadvine, another non-entity who knows about nothing other than violence. The two try to kill each other as if fighting is the only way they can relate. Then they form a strange bond as they attack some random guy in a hotel room. They split up but Toadvine will appear agaun later. You’d think with a name like Toadvine, there might be something of interest in this character’s life story. There isn’t; he’s just a walking embodiment of violence without any substance.
The Kid moves on and then spends a rainy night in a shack with an old man whose whole philosophy on life is that it is impossible to tell what other people think. This seems to be offered as a philosophical framework for the novel as a whole and if it’s meant to be, it works, not because that theme is sufficiently articulated but because the character development is so weak that it’s impossible to understand any of the players in the story. If that’s a result of bad writing, then it can be written off as just a trapping of genre fiction; if it’s deliberate, then McCarthy is a lazy author or else he just outright fails at writing ambiguity into his work.
But the Kid moves on and settles in with a gang of Americans who naively invade Mexico, thinking it will be an easy victory. Instead they all get slaughtered by Indians except for the Kid who moves on to jin another gang. That gang is led by Glanton, another character who is just as one dimensional as most of the other characters. Their most prominent member, however, is Judge Holden, most often just referred to as the Judge. Toadvine is also a member of this gang, though why this might be of significance is never explained. The gang is strangely multi-ethnic, consisting of mostly white men, but also including a couple Mexicans, some Delaware Indians, a Jew, and a Black cowboy who constantly fights with a white guy. This band of sadistic thugs is racially tolerant as long as the minorities are just as cruel and homicidal as the white guys. Is this meant to be social commentary? I don’t know.
Otherwise, McCarthy never tells us how many members the gang has and as a group they are just as non-descript as its individual members. It’s frustrating when out of nowhere, a character appears, says some arbitrary lines, and then disappears, never to be found in the narrative again.
One thing that can be said about Glanton’s gang is that they are indifferent to any kind of suffering, even when it is another gang member who needs help. In one of the better scenes, one member is injured after a fight and they all refuse to help him dress his wounds. They remind me of the kinds of assholes you’d find in an Ayn Rand novel; if you need help from someone else that’s your own problem and no one else’s. The only kind of teamwork they engage in is when they are involved in acts of destruction or warfare even though strength in numbers gives and advantage in combat. That’s probably why the gang shrinks from attrition and eventually disbands.
The Glanton gang get hired by the mayor of a city to hunt down and murder Apaches who are terrorizing the Mexican citizenry. The mercenaries collect their scalps for monetary reward, although they boost their incomes by taking scalps from mestizos, old women, and children then turning them in for reward. After getting paid, they celebrate by getting drunk and reveling in sex and violence to the dismay of the city’s inhabitants. Then they move on. When they’ve exhausted the supply of Apaches, they start attacking anyone they meet just because they have nothing better to do with themselves.
Then there is the Judge. He is resourceful, highly educated, and excessively cruel. He is unusual looking too, being seven feet tall and without any hair whatsoever on his entire body which can be verified because he likes to dance naked in the moonlight. I picture him as looking like Tom Homan, that mashed potato faced nazi creep who is our current head of ICE, the one responsible for deporting children and legal immigrants to hell holes like prisons in El Salvador and South Sudan without due process of law. Like Homan, the Judge also has no sympathy for humanity in any way. His whole existence is based around killing people and when he gets a hold of children, he does some unsavory things to them before he murders them and takes their scalps. In one of the most interesting passages, the Judge is sitting with the gang around a fire. He takes out a collection of things he found in the desert, sketches them in a note pad, writes a brief description, then destroys them. He explains that anything he doesn’t know about doesn’t have his permission to live. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, but it characterizes him as ultimately narcissistic, psychotic, and evil. The Judge is also strangely happy as he takes delight in his extreme acts of sadism and carnage. In the Judge, McCarthy has created a memorable character, but he doesn’t take his development far enugh. Understating his personality and psychology looks like an attempt at making the Judge mysterious and enigmatic, but this attempt fails in the end. There just isn’t enough there to see him as a substantial person evil, good, or otherwise. The Judge, along with the Kid, are more like elemental forces than people.
Like the Judge, the Kid also fails in this way, but even more so. It is hard to tell if he is the main character or not. His travels take up large portions at the beginning and end of the book, but after he joins up with Glanton and gang, he almost entirely disappears from the narrative save for some gunfights and other random events. He becomes a little more interesting towards the end as he begins to mellow with age and show some compassion for others, although there really is no build up to this and his change just happens arbitrarily. In one memorable scene, a procession of Penitentes gets massacred by Apaches. There is one survivor, an old woman, and he offers to protect her and get her back to safety. But on closer inspection he learns that she is a mummified corpse that had been long dead, making you question whether the massacre was a hallucination or not. This signfies that his attempt at compassion is an empty gesture and that, in all honesty, he has little of it. This is underscored later when he is confronted by a disrespectful teenager who he shoots impulsively during an argument. The Kid’s final confrontation with the Judge revolves around his infrequent displays of sympathy for others which the Judge sees as being a weakness. What is the Judge actually a judge of? We never really know, but one thing is for sure: he has sentenced everyone and everything to death.
This novel also prominently displays a hallmark of McCarthy’s writing: people wandering around aimlessly in an empty landscape. A lot of people comment on his ability to describe the desert of Mexico. In the beginning, at least, the descriptions of the lowlands of Chihuahua are good, but they eventually become redundant and boring. Like I always say, there is a difference between writing and listing and at times McCarthy isn’t writing. He inventories the desert in a way that is reminiscent of what makes Walt Whitman’s poetry so annoying to read. There are long stretches of the narrative that are nothing but repetitions of the same landscape, broken up at times by scenes of extreme violence. The violence, by the way, isn’t as disturbing as some claim it to be. It does nothing to alleviate the boredom of reading about the desert, comes off as juvenile at times, and serves no apparent purpose in the story other than being gratuitous. And the descriptions of the desert aren’t the best I’ve ever read either. Edward Abbey does a far superior job at that. I’ve lived in the American Southwest and done some extensive backpacking in those deserts, and what McCarthy writes here doesn’t even come close to how vibrant and alive the desert on both sides of the border actually is. His descriptions of the Sierra Madres are deficient too. While he does an adequate job of describing the planes and valleys, his ability to visually depict mountains is weak. They resemble paintings on a wall done by an amateur artists. He makes the mountains look like one dimensional objects in a three dimensional landscape. Again, I think this is just bad and lazy writing.
Blood Meridian is underwhelming. I think it mostly appeals to hipster types who like to brag on the internet about how edgy they are because they read disturbing books. But this one isn’t as transgressive as anything written by J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, or the Marquis de Sade, all of which I’ve previously read. Those authors are more authentically shocking because they use transgression to make social statements. Even Sade can be read as a satirical polemic against the European aristocracy. Blood Meridian doesn’t really have any message. It’s meant to be a portrait of Hell, but Hell doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know how people got there. As an anti-western, it’s meant to say that the Frontier Expansion era wasn’t as heroic as it is portrayed in Hollywood movies. But so what? Any student of American history, or any realist for that matter, would already know that. Besides that theme has already been explored in depth in the cinematic works of Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and John Ford. Even Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven deflates the myth that gunfighting is noble. And I don’t care if Harold Bloom loved this book; I never liked him anyways. Blood Meridian does have some memorable passages and I don’t think it’s a complete failure. It’s certainly not as bad as The Road which I thought was vapid, pretentious, and probably the most overrated book I’ve ever read. Blood Meridian is the kind of book I would only read once. Most of it is boring and it doesn’t live up to its hype.
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