posted on 09 Nov 2022

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer Cormac McCarthy has been in the news a lot over recent weeks. As he approaches the age of ninety he is publishing two linked novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. This alone is something of a sensation; that McCarthy is also spare and laconic in both speech and physique in the manner of an old-time cowboy and shuns literary society in favour of hanging out with scientists at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, add further to his newsworthiness and mystique.

Blood Meridian was published in paperback in the UK in 1989 and when I first read it in the very early-90s I knew nothing about McCarthy. His work at that time was little known here and all of the novels that would help make him a familiar name — the sparse and austere Border Trilogy, the brutal, noirish No Country for Old Men and the post-apocalyptic The Road — all lay in the future. 

How to begin to describe Blood Meridian? First, I suppose, to acknowledge that it is a ‘cowboy novel’ startlingly reinvented as Jacobean tragedy — a grandiloquently, baroquely violent and blood-boltered novel in which McCarthy’s soaring, astonishingly vivid prose sometimes leaves the reader gasping for breath. It is a novel of minute, cinematic detail and description, profoundly pessimistic and nihilistic, with almost every page depicting stomach-churning scenes of violence and cruelty. It is McCarthy’s rebuttal of every facile argument for optimism in the human species. The first time I read it I was simply bowled over — and ultimately exhausted — by the intensity of its language and vision. This is still true on rereading but this time I think more also became apparent about the underlying themes and structure of the book.

It is, however, despite its extravagance, rooted in history. The novel covers thirty-odd years, from the mid-1840s to the late-1870s, and is broadly as seen through the eyes of a character known simply as the Kid — an orphan of sixteen when the story opens, a man in his mid-40s when it closes. It is set during the chaotic and medievally cruel border wars with Mexico and the genocide against the various nations of American Indians indigenous to the Southwest US states and it focuses in particular on the history of the Glanton-Holden gang, an army of mercenaries for hire, which the Kid joins or is perhaps abducted by.

This gang were expansionists who believed that the US war with Mexico had not been completed and that disputed territories had been given up too easily. They were murderers, outcasts, and most notoriously scalp-hunters, and their leaders realised that the bounty offered on American Indian scalps by various states (including Mexico) presented an unparalleled opportunity: as long as the hair was dark and the skin brownish, no one would know (or perhaps care too much) whether the dead were American Indians, Mexican peasantry or simply passing pilgrims or travellers unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The leader, John Joel Glanton, certainly did exist, and he was, at least initially, a Texas Ranger. Whether his co-leader, Judge Holden, also existed is more doubtful as the only mention of this character is in a ‘memoir’ of questionable accuracy called My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue, by Samuel Chamberlain, a soldier who fought in the Mexican-American War. It seems more likely I think that Holden is an invention of McCarthy’s, as he shares some curious characteristics with the terrifying character of Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Both are monsters of evil, literally and figuratively — bald (in Holden’s case entirely hairless), gargantuan, often naked, and given to wild flights of Nietzschean philosophising on war and violence and their own indomitable will to power. Judge Holden is also almost certainly a paedophile and child murderer. There is also something similar in the way that both Apocalypse Now and Blood Meridian reinvent the genres they are ostensibly part of.

The novel is a sort of picaresque account of the gang’s horrific murders, genocidal attacks, drunken rampages and scalp-hunting sorties. It must also be said that it may at times be too repetitious an account, too gruelling in its insistence on horror. However, this is almost certainly not accidental: it is a characteristic of a number of McCarthy’s books. The unrelenting human brutality and cruelty of the period are played out across the desolate Southwest plains and deserts and rocky canyons where every mile seems littered with the bones and carcases of the human and animal dead.

Eventually this exhausting slaughter closes with the hunting to extinction of the American buffalo, the plains covered as far as the eye can see with towering piles of buffalo bones and slag-piles of flattened lead ‘medallions’ from the .50-calibre rounds fired by the hunters’ rifles. A curious and enigmatic epilogue suggests that the last thing the Kid sees is fence-post holes being sunk into the rock, marking the enclosure of the land and the end of the roving cowboy lifestyle.

At times it may feel that Blood Meridian is saying little beyond its commentary on man’s inhumanity and the ferocious and destructive greed of the settlement of the Western US. But read more closely — and McCarthy’s extraordinary prose invites the closest reading you are capable of — it sometimes seems that there is nothing that McCarthy has left out, no detail he hasn’t considered and imagined in all its horror or beauty or breathtaking abstraction.

I fear I have scarcely scratched the surface in describing this novel. It is not just a book; it is in every sense a reading experience. But let me emphasise that McCarthy makes no concessions whatsoever to the sensibilities of the reader and consequently this is not a novel for the squeamish. It is — entirely intentionally — both shocking and harrowing. And while it isn’t without its faults, I guarantee that you will never forget it. It is Cormac McCarthy’s greatest achievement.

 

Alun Severn

November 2022

 

Cormac McCarthy elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

 

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

 

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

 

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy