“Blood Meridian” Cormac McCarthy

Keep in mind that these comments are made by someone who has listened to “No Country for Old Men” multiple times by choice. Not only do I not need to listen to “Blood Meridian” again, I didn’t really listen very well the first time. My mind wandered and when I would reengage with the story, I really didn’t miss anything at all. Of course, McCarthy’s beautiful language is worth listening to (“The butcher-paper mountains lay in shadowy folds”), but this one is just a little too much for me---too much blood and gore, too much killing for killing sake, and too much lunacy. The one redeeming value of the recording is that it gave me a chance to practice my Spanish listening skills, and I perked up for those parts, but that is not enough to recommend the book. I have looked around on the web and have found people who highly recommend the book, one who has read it ten times, and so there is an audience for the book, I’m just not in it.

Based on the three McCarthy books I have read, these two and “The Road,” I am wondering whether he wrote anything that was not a road trip, so to speak. I knew his writing was set in stark landscapes, but is it possible for any of his characters to stay in one place for awhile? In “No Country” I could feel sympathetic toward most of the characters, and in “The Road” I had to pull for the boy to make it, but I feel no sympathy for the Judge, the Captain, the ex-Priest or even the Kid in “Blood Meridian.” In fact, in each skirmish with Mexicans or Apache or Comanche or whoever they were fighting, I hoped that it would be the last and the company would quit terrorizing the towns they came to. This is one of the few books where I kept hoping for people to die, but while there was plenty of death, it was always the wrong people who died. The Judge is hell-bent on destroying what is free and beautiful. The Captain is willing to kill to make a point, and then incredulous when called to account for it. The ex-Priest has his moments, but calls the Kid a fool for helping other people. I suspect that we are supposed to feel for the Kid, but regardless of his ability to survive and help others when he can, he is a killer, too. McCarthy moves back and forth between focusing on the Kid and stepping back to see what the mob is doing, and during the mob scenes we can’t forget that the Kid is an active and willing participant; he could have parted ways with the marauders long ago, but didn’t. Occasionally there are glimpses of humanity on the part of the Kid, but he never sacrifices survival for humanity. I think an important question to ask is why did he go along all that time? Also, how does the individual fit into mob violence?

I’m not sure what I am supposed to take away from this book. This gang of vigilantes is no better, in fact much worse, than the people they are hired to eliminate. Is that the moral, that a diet of killing and mayhem makes you want to kill and maim and rape and destroy? I had said earlier that I didn’t read McCarthy earlier in my life because I thought the books would be more for men than women, and while I argued against that with the first two, I go back to that opinion with this book. In Gwaltney’s “End of the Century,” the battle scenes were interesting studies of how people behave in dire situations and the people maintained their humanity, or in some cases regained it, but in “Blood Meridian” I find it hard to find humanity among the killers at all, and it is killing for killing sake, and not even for some ideal.

In my wanderings on the web looking for some insight into “Blood Meridian” I found that Webster believes it is a horror novel. I agree with this. One aspect of a good horror story is not being able to understand why the horror occurs and an inability to stop it. “Blood Meridian”’s got that in spades. In another view, Mohney at d i z t o p i a says that since the Glanton Gang and Holden are historical characters, this is a historical novel. Frightening. Frightening also to think that even though Mohney says they can’t make a movie of this novel it might get made anyway.