Blood Meridian

I cannot think of a better living American writer than Cormac McCarthy. He is probably best known today for The Road and No Country For Old Men. Both of these are fine novels but both surprised me with their minimalist, bare bones style. His earlier writings, such as Sutree and The Border Trilogy were closer to the ornate, almost long winded style, of Faulkner. The contrast is startling.

Blood Meridian is somewhere between the 2 styles. The plot is very simple, but the writing is complex, complex but beautifully done.

In fact, the beautiful writing is, in itself, a bit disconcerting, given the brutality of the book. The story is set along the Texas-Mexico border in the late 1840s and deals with a real historical incident. There was a gang of ex-soldiers, a seedy, violent bunch, the Glanton Gang, who were scalp hunters. it seems that the towns in the area were tired of being harassed by the Apaches and agreed to pay a bounty to anyone who killed some of them off, the payment being dependent on the display of a scalp from each dead Apache. McCarthy deals with this in a natter of fact way that is very disturbing. The violence is intense, yet, to those involved, it seems no big deal, and in that regard, it is pretty much the way things are. Men involved in constant brutality come to see it as just a part of their life and that is terrible in its implications.

There are 2 main characters. The kid, a young guy who joins the bunch, is never called anything else, just 'the kid.' His namelessness is somehow appropriate as he seemingly is nothing but a killer, a one-dimensional being who just does what he feels it is his lot in life to do. There is nothing to him except what he does.

The second main character is Judge Holden. Holden is the most terrifying creation in American literature. Not even Steven King in his wildest nightmares has come up with a being like Holden. I will not say much about him here because I do not want to spoil anything for those who have not read the book and I hope you do read it. Holden is frightening not simply because of his violence, but also because of his brilliance and his complete competence and because, through it all, he maintains a remarkable sort of joy about his actions. Hitler once said that he had seen the man of the future and it frightened him, Well, Holden may be just that man.

The end of the book is downright disturbing because the exact events are left unnamed. They are hinted at and in horror the implied is always more frightening than anything explicit. That was why Alfred Hitchcock made such terrifying films; he left things to the imagination. There is a sort of afterwards to the book that is even more puzzling. Suddenly, you feel as if you have left the Old West and stumbled into someone's demented peyote trip.

Blood Meridian is a disturbing book, horribly violent, but really no more so than Homer's Iliad. Like the Iliad, the most disturbing thing is its matter of fact acceptance that war is just a part of human life, always has been and possibly always will be. It is a decent into madness, yet it continues and the most frightening thing is, some, many, love it.