[.ca] Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (ISBN 0679728759)

From Amazon.com:
"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence.

Purple Pretense:
I came to this novel urged on by the gushing, almost speechless, praise of Harold Bloom in an interview on television a couple of years ago. He called it the most important novel of our time and MacCarthy the finest writer living. He said all of this in the context of a discussion of the controversy he created in breaking with some literary elitists in his severe criticisms of hallowed icons of the modern literary canon. In short, I got the impression that Bloom was as impatient with pseudo-literary pretentiousness as was I. So I picked up MacCarthy's noble work in a feeling of near euphoric epiphany. This was surely going to be the most gritty, realistic and (above all) unvarnished western ever written. Then I hit this sentence: QUOTE: The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid, like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. That would make for perfect purpling in H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness", but its a bit too much to swallow for a novel that aims to be an unvarnished account of unflinching realism. It is by no means an exceptional out take. The book is unctious with this kind of prose. MacCarthy is the absolute worst pretender to literary significance I have ever read for the plain reason that he tries so damned hard to be literary that it gets in your teeth like fine alkali dust. Yes, he has a fine gift for a well turned sentence. So do armies of nameless hacks and better known writers who never get nominated for being visionaries of our time. What sets him apart is his deliberate effort at obtuseness. He makes no obvious effort to say anything, so the mavens of literary pith conclude that it must be so profound that it reaches beyond the capacity of mere mortal words to tell, thoughts angelic or infernal in transcendence. Please. This is the kind of pretentious rubbish that has made Melville the dandy of lit professors for the last 150 years. I hate to be uncharitable, but the emperor is starkers. If you think this is as good as it gets, or rises above the too self-consciously literary efforts of modern fiction, then you need to read more widely.

Langauge:
It is actually immaterial that the book is based on "actual events". Shakespeare's history plays emerge from circumstance but transmute those circumstances by a use of language which compels us to tread an alien landscape, attentive to its details if we wish to come through it. To merely deride this work's language, in the dismissive way of some reviewers ( "pretentious") does not meet the challenge McCarthy set for himself in writing this work. If a professor read these words in a student's paper he would know that he was reading the words of a transfiguring author: Now wolves had come to follow them, great pale lobos with yellow eyes that trotted neat of foot or squatted in the shimmering heat to watch them where they made their noon halt. Moving on again. Loping, sidling, ambling with their long noses to the ground. In the evening their eyes shifted and winked out there on the edge of the firelight and in the morning when the riders rode out in the cool dark they could hear the snarling and the pop of their mouths behind them as they sacked the camp for meatscraps." or "They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with he dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god." Note, I have deliberately not chosen climactic moments to provide evidence of McCarthy's power and originality. Note that the Judge delivers soliliquies that are memorable in their impossibility: does anyone imagine that Richard III spoke as Shakespeare had him speak? Listen to the Judge: "The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others." There is dialogue too. It is often curt when contrasted with the Judge's speeches. But the dialogue is revelatory of character; trace the ex-priest's words with the kid. Read the kid talking with Sproule after the "legion of horribles" destroys Captain White's command and these two survivors pause in their escape: What do you want to do?said the kid. Get a drink of water. Other than that. I don't know. You want to try and head back? To Texas? I don't know where else. We'd never make it. Well you say. I ain't got no say. He was coughing again. He held his chest with his good hand and sat as if he'd get his breath. What have you got, a cold? I got consumption. Consumption? He nodded. I came out here for my health. The work coheres. It is a rich source of discussion and contemplation about man. In closing, I will point to something about the judge which I have not seen cited in these reviews: is it not interesting that the Judge, a scalp-hunter, is entirely hairless? Has nature construed a personage who cannot be scalped? Or one who thereby needs scalps?

The Seventh Steal:
One star for style; one for content....Here I was all set to do my own screenplay: the definitive Western remake of Igmar Bergman's Fifties' existential angstfest: "The Seventh Seal". I had the idea my version would counter the old medieval view with a more modern and updated take on the Christian faith. I sent the screenplay to my beloved cousin: night editor for a great midwestern newspaper and reader voracious. He says, "Read 'Blood Meridian'". YEP! there's the (descriptive-prose-) plagued countryside, the errant, questioning knight (Glanton) and his (kid) squire, the big, baldheaded devil (Holden - caul-field?), the crusade to wipe out thr infidels, the pilgrims, the dancing show! Plus, everybody dies in techicolor 'ultra-vi', like in Burgess! Real Horrorshow! Of course, it took me a couple of false starts to get past McCarthy's hermit hut scene early on, before I realized: Cormac is the protagonist! Well, call me "Fishmeal"! Without a first person, much less a feminine POV, I was leeft pretty much with Peckinpah-ian paeans to stylized butchery...... Bergman did it better in B & W in a narrower aspect ratio, fer sure.... but I did manage to finish the book with a couple of minor technical complaints: the mining scene could have benefitted from a perusal of an old miners' glossary (breaking rocks with a hammer is called 'cobbing', an obscure and arcane term the author somehow missed among the myriads); the word 'judgment' is consistently spelled with that aggravating extra (British) 'e'. Why not spell 'color' with the 'u'?..... Cousin Jackie: with your permission, I will send the screenplay along.

Sie mussen schalfen aber Ich muss tanzen.:
McCarthy writes in such beautiful, abstract, and often confusing, images. I've never encountered a prose so close to verse in all my years, as if many of the passages through BLOOD MERIDIAN could be lifted directly from some of the more dark, free verse of Eliot or Williams. And never have I witness something so gruesome and visceral and completely unfaltering in terms of chaos. This book is something magical, has a pitch-perfect ending, and some of the greatest characters. the judge dances

Over rated:
I am glad I didn't pay for this book. Get it from your local public library. It is okay, but not great. "The Kid" is hardly mentioned. If you have previously read about the atrocities and genocide that "Americans" have committed against the Native population then there is nothing new in this book. This book is all hype.