Blood
Meridian is set
in North America in the 1850’s. Most of the action takes place in Mexico. The
book follows a 19 year-old boy who after a few misadventures, joins a band of
men lead by the real life John Glanton, an ex-Texas Ranger. They head to Mexico
to hunt down marauding Apache Indians and get paid for their scalps. They kill
a lot of Indians, but then start killing Mexicans.
Similar to
McCarthy’s The Road, Blood Meridian
reads like watching a film, with no interior monologues from the characters and
very little dialogue. So a reader’s only real clue to a character’s motivations
is by observing what they do. All the men in the gang appear to be amoral
killers totally devoid of empathy for anyone. There are no heroes in this novel.
It shows the west as an ugly violent place where only the strong and the
uncompromising survive.
According
to Wikipedia “Academics and critics have variously suggested that Blood
Meridian is nihilistic or strongly moral; a satire of the western genre, a
savage indictment of Manifest Destiny “(In the 19th century, Manifest Destiny was the widely held
belief in the United States that American settlers were destined to expand
throughout the continent). “Harold Bloom called it "the ultimate
western;" J. Douglas Canfield described it as "a grotesque Bildungsroman
in which we are denied access to the protagonist's consciousness almost
entirely."
Blood Meridian is not an easy book to read. It’s
written in a style that will challenge many readers and have most reaching for a
dictionary. Some of the limited dialogue is even in Spanish, but a careful
reader should figure out what the conversation is about. Much of the book
involves long descriptions of the surrounding countryside as the gang rides
from one slaughter to the next. It’s left to the reader to decide what the
characters are thinking while they ride.
This is a
novel for those who enjoy a challenging read.
My next post will be about the ebook
promotional site Bookbub.
2 comments:
Hi, Graham.
I read 'Blood Meridian' in the 90s when it came out. It had a salutary effect on my thinking on writing. I rate it among the five best novels I've ever read. The reason is the language (a geological language akin to the power of 'Moby Dick'), the intensity (that language somehow internalises the landscape ie. the landscape is the principal character). I would argue the book does have a hero and that hero is landscape. It is so powerfully presented that we know it outranks the pestilent humans that scuttle across it. It's a long bow, but perhaps this is one of the great environmental novels.
Hi Tom,
Your thoughts on the landscape being the principal character are interesting. McCarthy certainly spends a lot of time describing it. Don't know about it being a hero though. Perhaps a mentor, that shapes the behaviour of the gang.
Graham.
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