Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, 1985
Blood Meridian is an extraordinary novel. It is profoundly violent, and at the same time quite lyrically beautiful. It reminded me at various points of The Odyssey, The Inferno, and even Don Quixote, without ever being self-consciously ‘literary’.
The events of the novel take place in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. During that war, the US effectively conquered the north of Mexico, which eventually became the South Western states including Texas, New Mexico and California. But despite this victory US control of this area was limited. Native tribes including the Comanche and Apache were still active and represented a threat to Mexicans and ‘Americans’ alike. Effectively this vast area of land was lawless. Settlers were vulnerable to raids by these tribes, so local governments in both northern Mexico and the Southwestern US employed mercenaries to hunt down these tribes, offering a bounty for each grisly proof of a kill.
The novel follows the adventures of an unnamed, troubled teenager known only as ‘the kid’. Born in Tennessee, by the age of fourteen he has “a taste for mindless violence”. He runs away from home and soon meets Judge Holden – the Judge – a character who haunts the rest of the novel. When he first encounters the Judge he incites a crowd to attack a preacher. This incident could be the trigger for the kid’s subsequent life of violence. He joins a militia planning to travel into Mexican territory: this is presented as a campaign to protect American settlers but it is clearly just an excuse for the gang to go looking for plunder. However, the gang is poorly prepared and under-equipped and is quickly wiped out by a war party of Comanches. This is not going to be a straightforward Western where the superior firepower of the Americans can overwhelm the poorly equipped ‘natives’. Blood Meridian is informed by many of the tropes of the tropes of the traditional Western narrative but consistently subverts them in this way.
The kid survives the massacre and sets out through the desert looking for somewhere to rest and recover, the first of many such aimless journeys. When he does eventually reach a town he is arrested by Mexican soldiers and jailed without trial. His time on a chain gang ends when he signs up for another gang of scalp-hunters led by Captain Glanton (closely based on a real historical figure). Glanton’s gang (although it is never described as such, that’s clearly what it is) includes the Judge that the kid had met earlier in the novel.
Much of the rest of the narrative follows the gang’s campaign of mindless violence through the increasingly hostile landscapes of this part of Mexico. In theory the gang are authorised by the Mexican authorities to kill Native Americans and return their scalps for a bounty. But they quickly work out that it is hard to tell Native American scalps from those from Mexicans, and begin killing and scalping people indiscriminately. Some of the scenes of the massacres, including those in which women children and babies are slaughtered, can be hard to stomach. Consider that your trigger warning.
The narrative point of view McCarthy uses to tell his story is chillingly calm and totally non-judgmental. The massacre scenes are stripped of adjectives and atmosphere, emphasising their brutality. The gang have no conscience, no sense of humanity at all. People are just products to be harvested.
As the long journeys to find more people to kill continue, we learn more about the Judge. One of the gang members tells a story about how he once helped an earlier version of the gang manufacture gunpowder which they then used to massacre the Apaches chasing them. The Judge is an enigmatic, almost supernatural figure. At times he is an avenging angel, at others he takes an academic interest in his environment, making sketches of the landscapes. the flora and fauna, and the native American artefacts that litter the landscape. He is perhaps Western colonialism personified, wreaking huge damage on the peoples and countryside under the guise of academic analysis.
Although largely operating with impunity, the gang eventually goes too far – after a fight at a cantina they attack a group of Mexican soldiers. Their contract with the local government is cancelled and a bounty is posted on Glanton’s head. The gang leave the area and travel to a neighbouring state, where they pick up another contract for Apache scalps. This is the cue for further scenes of brutality, although this time the gang meets more substantial opposition from both Native American warriors and Mexican soldiers. Eventually, at the Colorado River, they seize control of a key ferry crossing, and grow rich exploiting and robbing their passengers. This good life is abruptly ended by another attack from a local tribe, and most fo the gang are killed, including Glanton himself. The kid survives, albeit seriously wounded, and along with another survivor tries to escape. But now they are being tracked by the Judge, who has turned against them, and pursues them relentlessly.
Blood Meridian is shocking in its brutality, but also lyrically beautiful. McCarthy evokes the stark beauty of the landscape:
“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and 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 until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.“
But as the novel unfolds the landscape becomes increasingly hellish, with more and more bodies littering the ground. This is a journey into hell.
The only element of the novel that for me fell a little flat was the Judge’s philosophising. He is presented to the reader as a guru, someone whose thoughts on life and existence are worth listening to.
“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”
Or
“Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.“
Rather than these being profound meditations on power, good and evil, and so on, for me they were trite and out of place in the narrative. They weren’t needed. This didn’t in any way spoil the novel for me – I was more than happy to accept these speeches as brief interruptions soon passed by, but they felt heavy-handed, when everything the author wanted to say was already very clear. The wild west was not a place of adventure but a war-zone, devoid of morality. McCarthy has a bleak vision of humanity, but this is what makes him a prophet for our times.
The Reading Bug 