Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

   1985; 351 pages.  Full Title: Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Westerns; Historical Fiction.   Overall Rating: 7*/10.

 

    Perhaps now's a good time for our protagonist, "the kid", to heed the advice of Horace Greeley and “Go west, young man”.  It’s 1847, and he’s only fourteen years old, but Tennessee holds no future for him, and anywhere west of Memphis sounds like the Land of Opportunity.  So he opts to run away from home.

 
    Somehow the kid survives, and two years later he joins a band of mercenaries led by a man named Glanton, albeit mostly to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison.  Glanton’s gang makes its money by collecting bounties on Apache scalps of any kind: male or female, young or old, warrior or civilian; and it’s kind of hard to tell an Apache scalp from any other Indian scalp, or even a Mexican scalp for that matter.

 

    So saddle up, kid, and be sure to practice your shooting.  Scalp-hunters aren't very popular with anyone, and if the locals won’t sell you their food, you’ve no choice but to forcibly take it from them.  You do what you have to in order to go on living, and you get used to leaving piles of corpses in your wake.

 

    Don’t let it bother you that the line between right and wrong often becomes very blurry.

 

What’s To Like...

    Cormac McCarthy is best known for his 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road.  Blood Meridian is an earlier effort, published in 1985; it originally got a lukewarm reception but with time gained literary respect, to the point of where many now view it as the McCarthy's magnum opus.

    The overall timespan of the book is 1847-1878, the majority of the book covers a single year: 1849.  It is a pivotal year in the kid’s life, and most of the action takes place south of the border, often around the city of Chihuahua.  I liked the "feel" that Cormac McCarthy’s descriptions create for northern Mexico in those tumultuous days.  The three warring factions – the Apaches, the Mexicans, and the American guns-for-hire - are about equal in fighting strength and none of them trust the others one bit.  McCarthy portrays them all in an equal moral light, and I liked that.  When others are trying to kill you and food is scarce; there is no room for noble qualities, no matter what your ethnicity.

 

    Wikipedia says the theme of Blood Meridian is “the warlike nature of man”, and I’m inclined to agree.  There’s tons of violence in all sorts of forms: rape, murder, torture, scalping, fighting, starving, and even decapitation.  This is not a book for the squeamish.  The dying is not limited to the combatants – women, children, and babies are slain alongside the men, and any animal that wanders into this story is almost certainly about to die.

 

    Scalp-hunting is a dangerous profession and a lot less lucrative than you’d think.  Casualties run high in Glanton's militia and the remnants of the gang eventually drift north into the present-day American Southwest, making stops at Tucson, the Yuma ferry crossing, and San Diego.  By the end of that trek, the gang no longer exists; it’s every gunslinger for himself.

 

    The book is a wordsmith's delight – McCarthy sees no reason to use an everyday word when a high-falootin’ one is available, and it works quite well here.  Unsurprisingly, a lot of the dialogue is in conversational Spanish, given the settings.  McCarthy rarely supplies a translation of it, but I was usually able to suss out what was being said.

 

    I chuckled at the “Better Living Through Chemistry” lessons - when the gang runs out of gunpowder, a batch is made from the surrounding elements, and later on, when a medical knock-out agent is needed, the new wonder-drug of the times, ether, is used.  The fortune-telling scene involving tarot cards was interesting, and while I already knew about Fredonia, I had to look up Gnadenhutten in Wikipedia.  Finally, for the second time this year and my life, “charivari” showed up in the book I was reading.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Jornada (n.) : an arduous usually one-day journey across a stretch of desert.

Others: Parricide (n.); Sprent (v); and dozens more.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.5*/5, based on 3,949 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.16*/5, based on 113,698 ratings and 10,215 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    “I said are you quits?”

    “Quits?”

    “Quits.  Cause if you want some more of me you sure as hell goin’ to get it.”

    He looked at the sky.  Very high, very small, a buzzard.  He looked at the man.  “Is my neck broke?” he said.

    The man looked out over the lot and spat and looked at the boy again.  “Can you not get up?”

    “I don’t know.  I ain’t tried.”

    “I never meant to break your neck.”

    “No.”

    “I meant to kill ye.”  (pg. 10)

 

    “So what is the way of raising a child?”

    “At a young age,” said the judge, “they should be put in a pit with wild dogs.  They should be set to puzzle out from their proper clues the one of three doors that does not harbor wild lions.  They should be made to run naked in the desert until…”

    “Hold now,” said Tobin.  “The question was put in all earnestness.”

    “And the answer,” said the judge.  “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?  Wolves cull themselves, man.  What other creature could?  And is the race of man not more predacious yet?”  (pg. 153)

 

“I was afraid I was goin’ to die and then I was afraid I wasn’t.”  (pg. 74 )

    Blood Meridian was a slow, difficult read for me.  Cormac McCarthy has a unique writing style that you’ll either love or hate.  The use of quotation marks, apostrophes, and hyphens is taboo; and capitalizing proper nouns is arbitrary.  For the sake of clarity and my own grammar OCD-ness, I added them in the excerpts above.  Run-on sentences proliferate; and each chapter starts with a bunch of little notes that annoyingly (for me, anyway) give away any surprises that are about to occur.

 

    Then there are the lengthy landscape descriptions.  Yes, they set the scene, but the plotline stagnates while you read about the countryside, and this got tedious after a while.  There’s only so many new ways you can describe the Sonora desert and the mountains that surround it.

 

    After more than 250 pages being devoted to the events of 1849, the next three decades of the kid's life are squeezed into a mere 30, and the story grinds to a rather ambiguous ending.  The kid runs into an old acquaintance in a bar in Texas; a philosophical discussion ensues; and a mess is made in the outhouse.  Exactly what that mess consists of is not disclosed; the reader is left to draw his own conclusion.  Things wrap up with an epilogue that even Wikipedia doesn’t try to explain.

 

    7 Stars.  If you can make it through all the gore and tedium of the scalp-hunting campaign in Mexico, you'll arrive at the Yuma ferry crossing, where the pacing picks up nicely, and the storyline becomes very interesting.  Alas, even that blessing is relatively short-lived, nevertheless I'd still call Blood Meridian a worthwhile read.  I’ve never been keen on the traditional "Hollywood western" genre, and here the setting and time period were refreshingly different.  The book's back cover blurb notes the story is “based on historical events”, and since I’m a history buff, I ended up enjoying it, despite the weird writing style and interminable descriptions.