Product Description

Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. 'McCarthy's achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect...He is a great writer" - "Independent". "I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as "Blood Meridian"...A nightmare odyssey" - "Evening Standard". "His masterpiece...The book reads like a conflation of the "Inferno", "The Iliad" and "Moby Dick". I can only declare that "Blood Meridian" is unlike anything I have read in recent years, and seems to me an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement" - John Banville.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1752 in Books
• Published on: 1994-01-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
Virtually all of McCarthy's idiosyncratic fiction (The Orchard Keeper, Child-of God, Suttree) is suffused with fierce pessimism, relentlessly illustrating the feral destiny of mankind; and this new novel is no exception - though it is equally committed to a large allegorical structure, one that yanks its larger-than-life figures across a sere historical stage. "The kid" - a Tennessee teenager - wanders aimlessly into the Texas Indian wars of the 1850s. First he's taken on by a wandering troop of ex-American soldiers, planning its own raid into Mexico. Then, after thoroughgoing slaughter of the troops by the Indians, the kid survives to be recruited as a scalp-hunter in a band of Mexican-financed marauders - led by a madman named Glanton, along with his associate: The Judge, a hairless God-or-devil figure who is capable of great ingenuity (when the men run out of gunpowder, The Judge alchemizes a new batch) but who also indulges in eccentric sermons to explain his bloodthirsty brand of philosophy. ("If God meant to intrude in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?. . . The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his days.") McCarthy, even more than in previous novels, strains for prophetic, Bible-like tones here - with a cast of allegorical types (a judge, a fool, an ex-priest, the kid) and an archaic vocabulary that lurches from "kerfs" and "bedight" to "rimpled" and "thrapple." But, though there's something stubbornly impressive about McCarthy's unwavering gloom, the novel's unceasing slaughter sometimes suggests a spaghetti-western without a hero, all gore and blazing sun - while its stentorian, pretentious prose will quickly dissuade most readers from attempting to share McCarthy's dark vision. ("He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and," etc.). Grandiose, feverish, opaque. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. 'McCarthy's achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect...He is a great writer" - "Independent". "I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as "Blood Meridian"...A nightmare odyssey" - "Evening Standard". "His masterpiece...The book reads like a conflation of the "Inferno", "The Iliad" and "Moby Dick". I can only declare that "Blood Meridian" is unlike anything I have read in recent years, and seems to me an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement" - John Banville.

About the Author
Cormac McCarthy is the author of ten acclaimed novels, most recently The Road. Among his honours are the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Customer Reviews

A journey to the dark side
A long time ago a very astute reviewer said of Herman Melvilles great novel Moby Dick,"A polar wind blows through it and and birds of prey hover over it". A very fitting description of Cormac McCarthys "Blood Meridian" which it resembles.Both the Judge and Ahab are the Devil personified. Both lead their men to destruction over time and vast forbidding terrains. Ahab over the savage seas and The Judge over the stark lunar landscapes of the West. The characters in both books head towards inexorable destruction.
The book is a Western set in that time and place. But it does not slot easily into that genre. I can think of no Western that I can compare it with. Alan LeMays character Amos Edwards in "The Searchers" is a similarly dark character but he is not the devil himself. Aside from Moby Dick I can only compare it with certain Old Testament passages or perhaps an eighteenth century Gothic horror story. The setting I feel is irrelevant. I note one reviewer has read this novel five times such was its power. It has a terrifying beauty that has the strange ability to transfix you like the Gorgons head. You know you are looking at dark forces but are unable to avert your eyes. You are appalled yet compelled. I can understand the compulsion to go back to this book again and again. Could I ? I dont believe so. The novel is just too deep a look into mans heart of darkness. But read it once you must. The power of McCarthys writing takes the breath away. It possesses a strange biblical cadence. Yes it is also visceral, have no illusions, but for all that it is some of the most potent stuff I have read. He has his own unique style which the truly great painters and film makers possessed and he is stamped with the same hallmarks of greatness. Dare I say I believe his writing is as visionary as any of the last centuries writers. A bold claim I know. I can think of no author who can describe landscape better. Contemporary or otherwise. Only time will testify to the truth of this statement. McCarthy can make an unpromising plot mesmerising. Read "The Crossing" to evidence this.
Blood Meridian is set in the 1840s American/Mexican West. It covers the activities of a gang of scalphunters who leave rivers of blood in their wake. It was a period when this area was being laid waste in a scorched earth policy carried out by the Apache Indians. Mexico just South of the border was particularly hard hit. The Apache had warred with the Mexicans for centuries. The hatred ran deep between the two and atrocities were an everyday occurrence. The perfect setting for the nightmare vision that is Blood Meridian.
One can read many things into this film. Many of which may be correct. You must read it yourself and interpret it in your own way. Reading can be a very personal journey. For myself I just saw a rapid and spiralling descent into the dark recesses of the human soul. Aside from the Judge the other characters are not worth mentioning other than to say that they have not a single redeeming feature amongst them. They are a glimpse into those dark places where mans worst vices lurk. No depravity is beneath them. But there is a price to be paid come the final reckoning. They will be judged. The Devil himself lies in wait. He does not age and he laughs at the folly of men. He sees that man never learns from past mistakes. They keep him in business. This keeps him happy so that he can play his fiddle and dance to the end of time.

Far from his best
While there's always merit in McCarthy's prose, this book suffers badly from a lack of a plot. It's not much more than a collection of well written and interesting massacres.

Bloody and a Little Tedious
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian traces the kid, that is all we know him as, on an abominable adventure. The story traverse the wild west of the Texas and Mexico border landscape. It depicts the debauchery of a gang of rebels led by someone known as the judge and a character called Glanton. This gang ride on and on committing pointless pillage and murder. The reader is drawn into a beautiful rugged terrain where there is little or no sense of society and certainly no moral compass.

Blood Meridian does not depend on story telling in a conventional sense. Rather the novel's structure and execution is reminiscence of a fly on the wall documentary. The narrator holds the camera and points it at a series of events that is observed. This approach is clearly hightlied by the fact that each chapter summarises events in a pithy manner. Further, as the story progresses paragraph after paragraph begins in this manner: "They rode on, They paused without the cantina, They had lost four men" and so on in a deadpan manner. This approach has the effect of wearing down the reader.

For me the above presents a major flaw with the novel. McCarthy simply report events. Indeed, the novel is said to be based on true events that took place in the nineteenth century. There was no moral dilema for the band of rogues, there was no psychological conflict for any of the characters nor was there any conflict between the individual and his social milieu. As I read, I kept repeating to myself tell me something I don't already know or could researh in the relevant history. In other words, the novel is meant to reveal something new in the story it tells. Arguably, that is one of things that distinguishes it from mere story telling.

Nonetheless, it cannot be said of McCarthy's characters that they operate outside a social context. The politico/social world in which the chracters operate is a Hobbesian one, where the: "Life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." We know this because the narrator tells us that: "Here beyond men's judgment all covenants were brittle." In this new world men (for it is men who rape and plunder) are asserting themselves and the weak becomes vanquished. Ironically, if McCarthy purports Christian values then even God is unable to help. In one passage the kid enters a church to discover: "There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who'd barricaded themselves in this house of God against the heathen."

The impact of reading Blood Meridian is that one is left feeling battered by its relentless visciousness and barbarity. The diction of the prose is one of repetitive cruelty. In one pragraph the kid and his prisoner companions saw: "blackeyed young girls ..., a pack of vicious looking human ..., riders wearing scapulars or neckless of dried and blackened human ears." The prose also conjures up a sense of black-darkness. Many of McCarty's adjectives are compound words made up of black, for example blackeye, blackened and blackhaired. Along with the fact that the Indians are labelled: "half naked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh," someone with a politically correct bent would accuse at least McCarty's narrator of racism.

What lifts McCarthy's narrative from its depressing bleakness is at times his marvellous descriptive writing. Here is an example that comes alive in onomatopoeia fashion: "The first cries of birds in the trees along the river and the clink of harness and the snuffle of horses and the gentle sound of their cropping." These sounds are set in the predawn dark so even though we cannot visualise the scene we nonetheless get a good image of it by the sounds. This is first rate writing.

However, McCarthy's style is a mixed bag of the impenetrable and the transparent. In places the syntax of McCarthy's sentences is biblical in style. For example, "Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no sould save he." On the other hand, the use of figurative language captures and evokes the desolate landscape very well. For instance, "... where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus."

About a third of the way through this book, I felt that I had the measure of it and as I was not enjoying it I should cease reading it any further. Nonetheless, I ploughed on and discovered some passages of great writing. However, the sum of these great passages does not make up for a whole book that could be called great.