#49: Blood Meridian

With it increasingly difficult to discover great books and great authors I haven’t already read, I downloaded a list of the top 100 novels of the past 100 years. Inspired by the list, I decided to read each and every one of them. Classics such as The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye I had previously slugged through in school, but I determined to reread them as part of my endeavor since I paid scant attention to their literary merit during our first encounter. Give me my C and let’s move on was my mantra at the time.

I recently picked up Blood Meridian without even realizing it was in the Top 100. Early this year, I read The Road, a downer of a novel but memorable for its bleak message about survival, plus I’ve seen No Country For Old Men, so I thought I’d give it a try. It turns out Blood Meridian is an American version of The Iliad, replete with bloody massacres, attempted Genocide, and ruminations on fate and free will.

Two things stand out the most:

1. Blood Meridian lives up to its name. It is extremely violent. It graphically depicts a series of encounters between a small band of Indian scalpers and their Apache and Mexican victims. The author makes no attempt to tinge this violence with a moral component. The violence just is, and for the most part, the characters accept it as a part of life.

2. The writing is stark. McCarthy employs plenty of majestic words, many of them archaic, but he does not adorn the writing with much narrative omniscience. We mostly have description. A description of the land, the barren desert of the Southwest. A description of the action, which is mostly men sitting on their horses, wandering forlornly through that desert. A description of the aforementioned violence. Conversations do not come adorned with quotation marks. You might go several pages without finding a comma. It is easy to get lost in the constant stream of pronouns and verbs, wandering who belongs to which, or weighed down by the long stretches of geography that provide wide buffers for the sudden outbreaks of activity. But the further you go, the more you become absorbed in McCarthy’s unique rhythms.

According to the novel, our lives amount to little more than blood and dust:

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

I found Blood Meridian strangely engrossing, despite what you might consider merely a serviceable plot. Instead of a complete narrative, you have a series of bloody episodes where the threat of violence creates a hopeless tension. Can the characters find some way out, or are they all doomed? McCarthy seems to answer that each and every one of us is doomed from the beginning. The truth, much like our lives, is stark.

Quitting The Grave Cover ThumbCheck out Decater's new novel, available now at Amazon. Plus, don't forget his earlier books: Ahab's Adventures in Wonderland and Picasso Painted Dinosaurs.