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: #977 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

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.

Disappointing: Not as engrossing as other McCarthy Novels
I have already read several Cormac McCarthy novels and found them all thoroughly entertaining, emotional and thought provoking. I am sorry to say that I found 'Blood Meridian' quite disappointing; in fact, I stopped reading it just over 3/4 of the way in as I was getting bored with it and just couldn't be bothered to finish it. Despite it clearly being a work of McCarthy, with his fantastic descriptive techniques and conversational style of writing, the story just did not hold my attention or provoke my interest in the same way his other works did.

The plot covers an ever-changing selection of male characters, with a few that are prominent and have an enduring-presence, who are involved in the 'Indian' wars of the 1840s in West Texas and Mexico. They are essentially mercenaries, except that there is very little discrimination as to who, or what, is killed nor whether a reward will actually be forthcoming for their 'work'.

There is an extreme level of violence, a lot of it is senseless and unprovoked and it goes largely unexplained or justified. Whilst I was not put-off by that violence (or lack of reasoning for it), it was essentially this and other repetitive occurrences which dominate the plot, with nothing else of enough note happening to maintain my attention. I believe the main premise of the novel is to highlight that indiscriminate and brutal violence, but I don't think that was good enough reason to justify it being fictionalised with no other significant elements to the tale.

For me, the magic of McCarthy's writing is that despite there rarely being an all-encompassing plot, an interest is maintained by a combination of being interested in his fascinating characters and/or the wry humour associated with their story.

Blood Meridian has one interesting character (The Judge), but he does appear until some way into the novel nor feature prominently enough from then on (despite him clearly evolving into the central character); crucially, I did not feel any connection or real interest in the fate of any of the characters.

Yes, as I have already alluded to, the identifiable methods and style McCarthy uses to describe the action are present and occasionally breathtaking. But halfway through the novel, whilst I was still engrossed, I realised the monotony of what was happening and slowly (and reluctantly) realised that this was not classic McCarthy; I think there is good work inside this novel, but it needs to be about half the length.

If I compare this book to my favourite McCarthy work, 'Suttree' (see my Amazon review), there is no contest. When I note that Blood Meridian was published in 1985 and Suttree in 1989, I can only presume that McCarthy matured as a writer at some point between those dates.

By all means, give Blood Meridian a try to experience a unique and noteworthy writing-style describing dramatic violence and traumatic life, but don't expect the story to develop much from what is outlined within the first few pages.....

My recommendation is to read Suttree instead !

Not for me thanks
Ok so there is great prose and a dark story line but it is so extreme what is the point? I struggled to get into this book and could not make any connections with the characters; it was difficult to understand why they were doing what they were doing and where they were going. The coincidences were also beyond credible. I would give it a bye and read "No country" or "the road"