I've read Blood Meridian again, and I think I know more about it than I did the last time. Although I've not read everything by McCarthy yet I've read enough to know that there's a strange pattern to them from Blood Meridian (1985) onwards, in terms of the style and the content. Blood Meridian is the first of his Westerns and was followed by the Border Trilogy novels, released throughout the 90s. They're all set in the same place, are ostensibly about the same kind of characters and are somewhat similar in terms of the philosophical and religious musings littered throughout. The main difference is the amount and detail of the violence depicted in them. I don't want to dwell too much on the violence of Blood Meridian, though I will touch on it later.
I say it's strange reading these books with similar settings in the order they were written and published (and you could include No Country for Old Men in that sequence too) because Blood Meridian feels like a more advanced exploration of the setting and themes. The Border novels are much more recognisable as straightforward westerns, with sympathetic protagonists and somewhat definable purposes and motivations. The writing is more straightforward too. The short, distinctive sentences are still there but in Blood Meridian they feel a bit more obscure, maybe there's less recognisable words in them or there's greater frequency of sentences that last a page. It's not so much that the Border novels feel dumbed-down in terms of their style or that the overall quality is diminished, but if I was to recommend them to someone who's never read McCarthy I'd go for the Border novels first. Certainly now for me, being much more familiar with McCarthy Blood Meridian is a lot less monolithic than I remember it being. I think any of the complexity in the language contributes to a book's reputation as being 'good' or 'difficult' but even though that's punctured to an extent now because I know what to expect, I don't think it lessens the impact of the book as a whole.
Set on the US-Mexico border mainly in 1849-50, the story follows unnamed protagonist the kid as he enters a world of violence and debauchery. After some failing wanderings he joins up with a gang headed by John Glanton, a real life historical figure who was commissioned to go around the area collecting the scalps of Mexican and native tribes who were attacking American settlements. Such a party led by and comprising an assortment of violent, uneducated drunks ends up going about as well as you would expect, as they move on quickly from the warriors to scalping everyone they come across, usually after robbing and destroying their settlements.
Rather than the leader of the gang or the protagonist the most memorable character is Judge Holden, a huge, entirely hairless man who fulfills a recurring McCarthy trope of a seemingly impossibly eloquent and insightful infallible person among a cast of reactionary animals. The irony here gets cranked up several notches as Holden (as an aside, I'm struggling to remember why he's ever called a judge in the first place) proves to be infinitely more savage than anyone else in the book. The thing is though, where the rest of the book's violence can become so overbearing to the point of being unremarkable, Holden's actions exist in some other plane entirely and always seem worse, no matter how ridiculous or improbable. When the gang is stopped to camp for the night one of them tells a story of how Holden came to ride with Glanton, as he was waiting for them at the top of a ridge as Glanton and some of his men were running from some Apaches, none of them with any powder for their guns. Over the next day or so Holden concocted powder out of charcoal and urine, then beckoned the Apaches up making them think he was the only man left, before they were all slaughtered. It's ridiculous to read and it's ridiculous to write now, but as you read the book you get the same mixture of awe and fear the rest of the characters do. I'll say that's a mark of how well-crafted he is.
As enthralling as certain McCarthy passages and sentences can be, I'm going to pick one out that struck me this time around:
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 chimera having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded 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.
Brown spat into the fire. That's some more of your craziness, he said.
The words of Brown there, just to juxtapose the coarseness of the ordinary with the absurdity of the remarkable. Part of the reason Holden is seen as some sort of manifestation of God (which in itself is another recurring feature of McCarthy, or if not strictly God then some agent of fate or ultimate irrevocable judgement) is because of how comprehensively he's able to catalogue and dominate the world he finds himself in. There's another passage somewhere where someone asks why he carried a book where he notes all the animals and plants he sees and he says it's because Man can only truly be in control of nature when he knows all of it, when there is no unknown left to threaten him. Yet with this, and the passage above, it's not the world itself that Glanton's gang is trying to assert control over, it's their fellow man. Yet when they have this seemingly infallible person with them, none of them are really at ease with him or follow his example. I think what sets Holden apart from the rest of the horrors in this book isn't the things he does as much as the things he doesn't do. The kid as a focal point for the reader's attention is slightly more sympathetic than the rest of the characters because he's never as indiscriminately violent as them, he only lashes out when he's provoked or forced. Holden straddles a similar line yet never seems to be in any such danger. He walks through the desert, naked and hairless, and even though you know he's not going to be killed or beaten or commit any act of violence without there being an explanation from him first the wariness comes from his unpredictability. I suppose the direct version of this paragraph is that Holden is a paradox, feared by his peers for his certainty and infallibility yet a figure of menace to the reader owing to that same certainty creating an unknowable outcome for any situation he finds himself in. Who could have thought for instance that he could make gunpowder out of **** and rocks?
I think most telling about Holden as a figure of some unknowable evil is actually ironically linked to the depiction of violence in the book. It's constant and unforgiving to the point of desensitisation. Scalping, beheading, rape, sodomy of corpses, child abuse, animal abuse, turd eating, vivid descriptions of injury and cruelty not seen since the Iliad, it's ~330 pages of this. Then at the end, as the kid is now the man, he meets Holden again after all the other gang members are killed or otherwise unaccounted for and they have a chat. Then, the last mention of the kid/man:
The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him.
This takes place in an outhouse of the bar the two men are at. This closing description of the kid is followed by two other men looking in, unable to describe or contemplate what they see. While this ending has prompted various Soprano-esque theories about what actually happened, it's not really necessary to know any of the details. It's not even necessary to consider it alongside the debauchery that Holden is depicted in engaging in the next, final page. A book which is so unrelentingly unapologetic in its treatment of violence and the base depravity of human nature ends with a confrontation between its two most developed and insightful characters which is beyond the description or contemplation of the people who witness it. Holden celebrates war as the ultimate expression of human creativity and individuality, every aspect of this is explored extensively as Holden and the men try to find some purpose in their lives through it, yet this is how the book ends. What then are we to think of this as a closing of the story that has passed? When I read and wrote about this the last time I had this to say:
Thinking about Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men I think that the possibly pessimistic judgement of humanity by McCarthy isn't so much about humanity in general as in the individual. No Country For Old Men is about men in that there are several individuals in the story who do things, but they're as interesting individually as they are collectively. Part of this is down to their own motivations and actions but more is owing to them being part of distinct social structures yet retaining several unwavering core personal principles which are common among them. Blood Meridian exists in a similar manner. The people in the gangs that the kid encounters have their own distinct backstories, explained fully or otherwise, but they're all in the gang so they all do the same things because they've all ended up there together. That's all there is. Some individuals rise above this though. The chief antagonists of the book are Glanton and the judge and on the face of it Glanton should be the chief bad guy. He's the leader of the gang. He's unquestionably the most violent, the most indiscriminately violent. He kills people, he kills animals, he steals, he does everything. There is no other dimension to his character. He is a killer, he kills. The judge though, well. Maybe it's because he can speak sentences more than two lines long, but the way he tries to justify what he does is what sets him apart and makes him much, much scarier. Elsewhere you may feel the characters are just physical vessels of human nature acting out the only things they are capable of. The judge continually gives off the pretence of being enlightened enough to understand this. But then, he revels in it. He revels in his own actions and the actions of his contemporaries.
From what I've read of McCarthy I think this is what I take from him the most. He seems to have a very rigid view of what humanity is and does. Not only rigid, absolute. The way things are are the way they are because they exist. That's all there is. That's all he has to say. What he describes and tells stories of is just a snapshot of a world he knows and his probably interested in. In a book with depictions of violence as graphic as Blood Meridian though the inclusion of the judge, some recurring attempt to find justification in all of this is far more unnerving than any scalping or other violent act.
Aside from being mildly pleased that I can read an old review of mine on here and not cringe my way through the whole thing, I think ultimately the sense of war (or conflict, if you want to be less grandiose) as a means of human expression and being is too monolithic to be an accurate reflection of what I take from the McCarthy I've read. Blood Meridian, along with the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men and the road, is a highly individual text in that the focus lies predominately on one person's experience of the world. It may be shaped by interactions with other characters we are given insight too, but everything returns to the main character and how they are affected by what goes on. While this is the case in Blood Meridian the events and the interpretations thereof by the characters able to offer such insight are too broad, too large-scale to be truly relatable to the plight of the individual. The kid at times barely feels like anything other than a fly on the wall to the events described, yet it's through this perspective the reader has to contend with various philosophical arguments espoused throughout, explicitly or otherwise.
Is that why I started out by saying that I find Blood Meridian 'strange' in relation to McCarthy's other Westerns, in that it seems more complex than the works which followed it? Probably. I certainly don't think it lessens the impact of what the book is about however, and to consider that this, The Crossing and No Country for Old Men came from the same writer on the same subject and which are so similar and distinctive in terms of style can be so distinct themselves in how they explore their themes is, well... I'll leave you to ponder that silently as you peer round an open door.
One other thing I will add any time I read one of these such books: for a writer who focuses so rigidly on short, direct sentences I am always amazed at their effectiveness in depicting a sense of scale. The desert borderlands the book is set in are huge, the men travelling through them insignificant. This sense of scale alone could be described in reference-length works, yet McCarthy is able to do the same by saying that some men travelled for five days and saw no change in the landscape. It's an astonishingly fitting style of writing for the things he actually writes about.
