Review of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Harold Bloom is right about Cormac McCarthy: he really does wear his influences on his sleeve. His language has all the dark brooding of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor’s tang of Gothic surrealism. For me, the real pleasure of this book, my first novel by McCarthy, was the language. There are magnificent descriptions of deserts, mountains, animals, and the blindness we encounter when we forgive, or perhaps even when we remember, our human moral sense. This isn’t in any way a plot-driven novel; in fact, nothing much happens in way of action at all. It is just a story of a kid – that’s actually his name – who runs away from home at a tender age and travels west to join up with a gang patrolling the Texas-Mexico border. “Patrolling” is a bit of a formal word for a group of vagabonds who have been commissioned to bring back the scalps of Indians, but there it is. They wander and wander and wander, heading west aimlessly. 

But it is an fascinating group of characters, including a spiritually lost ex-priest named Tobin and Judge Holden, a seven-foot tall, muscular, completely hairless man who has some demonic affinities, though I’m not so sure he’s actually meant to be the Devil himself (or a symbol thereof), as many others seem to think. For all his caprice and cruelty, he may well be one of the most human people in the group. McCarthy also gives the Judge an inferiority that he completely deprives the other characters of. He knows several languages, is extraordinarily well-read, and often waxes philosophically about subjects that leave others disconcerted and confused. He has a tremendous intelligence and ability to reason, but often uses these for the ends of violence, deceit, and bloodshed. Isn’t Judge Holden, then, the model not for the Devil, but for human beings themselves? 

And there is the violence, which is sometimes difficult to bear. One of the major characters wears a necklace made of desiccated Indian ears; Judge Holden spends one night comforting a young Indian boy to gain his trust, only to be found the next morning scalping the boy in flagrante delicto. McCarthy’s repetitive scenes of shootings and scalping have a peculiar way of becoming – even to type it feels eerie – boring. It is morally and sometimes even aesthetically desensitizing. This is certainly part of McCarthy’s purpose, too. I suppose complaints about human psychology, though, might fall on deaf ears.

Most everything you’ve likely already heard about this novel is true. It is violent. It is bloody and full of gore. And, perhaps most painfully, it doesn’t apologize for being either of these. Surprisingly, though, many readers seem to want an apology for what Cormac McCarthy has chosen to write about here. If you read a summary of the novel, you know you will, at the very least, read about scalping. It seems to me that you’re doing the book a real disservice if you’re a reader who can’t stand to read about violence like this, but goes on to knock it precisely because of that. This is like reading “The Compleat Angler,” and writing a review saying “It was great, but I don’t really like fishing – I give it two stars.” If you can’t stomach large doses of violence, this book simply isn’t for you. You won’t enjoy it. But for your sake as a potential reader, I hope that’s not the case. There’s a lot to enjoy here including the spectacular writing, and plenty to keep you up thinking at night.