A terrific book, with qualifiers | Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

A Great Writer Unfortunately Defined by What He Left Out | Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West | Cormac McCarthy

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	• Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West Cormac McCarthy Vintage, 1992 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 312 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Read this book for the imagery.

It is difficult to connect with the main characters in this book. The story meanders from one situation to the next while Cormac narrates from the clouds. You will not find yourself daydreaming about the Kid and the various people in this book.

The 4 stars comes from Cormac's ability to create such vivid imagery with words beyond most vocabularies. I was engaged throughout the book by the images flowing through my head. He alternates between simple sentences and long elaborate passages that sound like poetry.

Here is an example: "The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolobes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor."

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A terrific book, with qualifiers

OK, this is the third Cormac McCarthy book I've read in a row, following 'The Road' and 'No Country for Old Men'. Each is alike in some ways yet different in many. All are written, quite obviously, by the same author. I say obviously for the two reasons of his name is on each and his stamp, his method of writing is in each. To talk about McCarthy's books is to talk about his style along with the content.

This book is chock-full in each sentence. It's not empty writing, ever. There's a ton of words you won't be familiar with, yet you'll get the gist of each. There's words he's most certainly cobbled together from others, but again, you'll see why and understand how each fits. He doesn't use much punctuation and produces paragraph long run-on sentences. He doesn't translate the Spanish into English for you, no matter how long the conversation. And yet, it all still works. In fact, it works because of what he does, not in spite of it.

Before 'The Road' and 'No Country...', I wouldn't have continued much past the opening paragraphs of this book, such is the writing. With those two as my experience, I knew it was worth having to pay attention to read this book - and I was not disappointed. My god, the imagery, the things he can bring to life. Or death. Of course, the Judge and Granton and the expriest are all larger than life characters, even the ones based on real folk. Of course, the descriptions are more graphic than need be. It's all part of the journey. If you take it, you won't regret it.

If you like simple prose for a before-sleep read, something to let you down easy - this ain't it. If you're looking for happy-go-lucky, everybody ends up better for the experience stories - look elsewhere. If you're looking for a book that will have you reading and re-reading the words, seeing visions so clear and characters and stories so intense you'll find yourself looking at the clock saying 'dang! it's that late!', then this is your book.

Be forewarned, if you like this one, you're gonna want to read more McCarthy. 'The Road' is totally accessible to anyone. 'No Country' needs no introduction. Next on my list is 'Child of God'. Also, be prepared to be disappointed, because at some point, the book will be over and you'll have to look for something to read to replace it. That won't be easy.

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A Great Writer Unfortunately Defined by What He Left Out

McCarthy is not for everyone. The violence of Blood Meridien is graphic and pervasive, but is also cold and emotionless, and it dehumanizes many of the characters. I found no dark humor here, only darkness, but not evil. Of course there are evil acts perpetrated by nearly everyone McCarthy chose to include as a character and those who don't are either killed before they have a chance, or shown as fools to juxtapose the reality of western expansion of the United States. So the question that arises is "why?"

McCarthy based this book on real events, the participation of the eradication of the indigenous population of North America by scalp hunters paid by the Mexican government to track down and kill Indians, the scalps serving as receipts to prove that Indians had been killed. When caught by Indians, the scalphunters suffered the same fate and worse at the hands of their intended prey, which left a river of blood in the wake of these marauding bands. McCarthy's point here is to destroy the romanticism of how the West was won that has supplanted the reality of genocide and ruthless destruction. The West was won by an almost unimaginable amount of killing, Indian and buffalo alike, by our ancestors, and McCarthy wanted to write a book about how and why people ended up doing this, and wipe out the hideous mythology of sentimental and delusional western hacks like Louis L'Amour. At this he succeeds brilliantly. No one who reads this book should ever think of the American West of the 19th Century in the same way again.

Part of what drives the book and its characters is the love of war by some, and the acceptance of war by others. The relevance to our current foreign policy situation is even more startling than when McCarthy wrote the book in the 80s.

McCarthy's wordcraft is everything it's hyped to be. There aren't many writers working today who can craft descriptions of the landscape with as much compelling wonder and detail. One section early in the book, a long, unpunctuated description of a band of men attacked by Commanches, stands as far as I'm concerned with some of the greatest literary achievements in history, Hamlet's soliloquy, the last few pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the opening scenes of The Sound and the Fury, the death of Joe Christmas in Light in August, chapter 4 of V, Joyce's The Dead, just to name a few off the top of my head.

Yet there was something missing from this book that weakened it for me. It is a great book, but not a perfect book, and that is because McCarthy has no use for women. Even in scenes with women, they are tossed aside as unimportant. This is a book about men, he leaves no doubt, but he never even for a moment speaks of sensuality, need, and desire, and despite his wilingness to describe violence in lurid detail, his view of the human experince remains myopic. He barely mentions sex, and refuses to detail it despite his chances to. Graphic violence is everywhere, these are men passionate about their killing, yet their sex lives are so glossed over or ignored they stop seeming like men. One could imagine a band of robots sitting in for the men in this book because it is bereft of the most human of desires. This huge absence left me sad because I wanted to really love this book, and love this writer, but he is so ensconced in masculinity and unable to even approach the female side of his male characters, let alone the females characters, and the mens' needs for them, that ultimately I was put off. Blood Meridien could have stood as an example of the great American novel, but instead it stands as a brilliant near-miss, a great book that missed its chance to be the greatest, letting itself be defined by this failure. As an example of being able to encompass violence and sensuality, I feel I know what I'm talking about, thusly: Mad God

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Great, Challenging Read

This is an American classic. It is a very challenging read for the use of archaic language, the intensive descriptions of the landscapes of the southwest, and the stomach-clenching violence. However the reader is very well rewarded for meeting McCarthy's challenge. The reader is transported to an arduous era that tested man's character in the savage beauty of American desert.

peckinpaugh/falukner

To live in Cormac McCarthy's world is to know death in all its manifestations: from nature and wolves to human acts of evil or necessity, when good men do bad things to survive. Blood Meridian was high noon for this. A psychotic dream across the page - Sam Peckinpah meets William Faulkner - it felt more like lava than language.

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