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| Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West (Picador Books) | 
 enlarge | Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.84
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 2302
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0330312561
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780330312561
ASIN: 0330312561
Publication Date: January 7, 1994
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 A journey to the dark side September 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A long time ago a very astute reviewer said of Herman Melvilles great novel Moby Dick,"A polar wind blows through it and and birds of prey hover over it". A very fitting description of Cormac McCarthys "Blood Meridian" which it resembles.Both the Judge and Ahab are the Devil personified. Both lead their men to destruction over time and vast forbidding terrains. Ahab over the savage seas and The Judge over the stark lunar landscapes of the West. The characters in both books head towards inexorable destruction.
The book is a Western set in that time and place. But it does not slot easily into that genre. I can think of no Western that I can compare it with. Alan LeMays character Amos Edwards in "The Searchers" is a similarly dark character but he is not the devil himself. Aside from Moby Dick I can only compare it with certain Old Testament passages or perhaps an eighteenth century Gothic horror story. The setting I feel is irrelevant. I note one reviewer has read this novel five times such was its power. It has a terrifying beauty that has the strange ability to transfix you like the Gorgons head. You know you are looking at dark forces but are unable to avert your eyes. You are appalled yet compelled. I can understand the compulsion to go back to this book again and again. Could I ? I dont believe so. The novel is just too deep a look into mans heart of darkness. But read it once you must. The power of McCarthys writing takes the breath away. It possesses a strange biblical cadence. Yes it is also visceral, have no illusions, but for all that it is some of the most potent stuff I have read. He has his own unique style which the truly great painters and film makers possessed and he is stamped with the same hallmarks of greatness. Dare I say I believe his writing is as visionary as any of the last centuries writers. A bold claim I know. I can think of no author who can describe landscape better. Contemporary or otherwise. Only time will testify to the truth of this statement. McCarthy can make an unpromising plot mesmerising. Read "The Crossing" to evidence this.
Blood Meridian is set in the 1840s American/Mexican West. It covers the activities of a gang of scalphunters who leave rivers of blood in their wake. It was a period when this area was being laid waste in a scorched earth policy carried out by the Apache Indians. Mexico just South of the border was particularly hard hit. The Apache had warred with the Mexicans for centuries. The hatred ran deep between the two and atrocities were an everyday occurrence. The perfect setting for the nightmare vision that is Blood Meridian.
One can read many things into this book. Many of which may be correct. You must read it yourself and interpret it in your own way. Reading can be a very personal journey. For myself I just saw a rapid and spiralling descent into the dark recesses of the human soul. Aside from the Judge the other characters are not worth mentioning other than to say that they have not a single redeeming feature amongst them. They are a glimpse into those dark places where mans worst vices lurk. No depravity is beneath them. But there is a price to be paid come the final reckoning. They will be judged. The Devil himself lies in wait. He does not age and he laughs at the folly of men. He sees that man never learns from past mistakes. They keep him in business. This keeps him happy so that he can play his fiddle and dance to the end of time.
 Far from his best September 15, 2008
While there's always merit in McCarthy's prose, this book suffers badly from a lack of a plot. It's not much more than a collection of well written and interesting massacres.
Bloody and a Little Tedious July 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian traces the kid, that is all we know him as, on an abominable adventure. The story traverse the wild west of the Texas and Mexico border landscape. It depicts the debauchery of a gang of rebels led by someone known as the judge and a character called Glanton. This gang ride on and on committing pointless pillage and murder. The reader is drawn into a beautiful rugged terrain where there is little or no sense of society and certainly no moral compass.
Blood Meridian does not depend on story telling in a conventional sense. Rather the novel's structure and execution is reminiscence of a fly on the wall documentary. The narrator holds the camera and points it at a series of events that is observed. This approach is clearly hightlied by the fact that each chapter summarises events in a pithy manner. Further, as the story progresses paragraph after paragraph begins in this manner: "They rode on, They paused without the cantina, They had lost four men" and so on in a deadpan manner. This approach has the effect of wearing down the reader.
For me the above presents a major flaw with the novel. McCarthy simply report events. Indeed, the novel is said to be based on true events that took place in the nineteenth century. There was no moral dilema for the band of rogues, there was no psychological conflict for any of the characters nor was there any conflict between the individual and his social milieu. As I read, I kept repeating to myself tell me something I don't already know or could researh in the relevant history. In other words, the novel is meant to reveal something new in the story it tells. Arguably, that is one of things that distinguishes it from mere story telling.
Nonetheless, it cannot be said of McCarthy's characters that they operate outside a social context. The politico/social world in which the chracters operate is a Hobbesian one, where the: "Life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." We know this because the narrator tells us that: "Here beyond men's judgment all covenants were brittle." In this new world men (for it is men who rape and plunder) are asserting themselves and the weak becomes vanquished. Ironically, if McCarthy purports Christian values then even God is unable to help. In one passage the kid enters a church to discover: "There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who'd barricaded themselves in this house of God against the heathen."
The impact of reading Blood Meridian is that one is left feeling battered by its relentless visciousness and barbarity. The diction of the prose is one of repetitive cruelty. In one pragraph the kid and his prisoner companions saw: "blackeyed young girls ..., a pack of vicious looking human ..., riders wearing scapulars or neckless of dried and blackened human ears." The prose also conjures up a sense of black-darkness. Many of McCarty's adjectives are compound words made up of black, for example blackeye, blackened and blackhaired. Along with the fact that the Indians are labelled: "half naked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh," someone with a politically correct bent would accuse at least McCarty's narrator of racism.
What lifts McCarthy's narrative from its depressing bleakness is at times his marvellous descriptive writing. Here is an example that comes alive in onomatopoeia fashion: "The first cries of birds in the trees along the river and the clink of harness and the snuffle of horses and the gentle sound of their cropping." These sounds are set in the predawn dark so even though we cannot visualise the scene we nonetheless get a good image of it by the sounds. This is first rate writing.
However, McCarthy's style is a mixed bag of the impenetrable and the transparent. In places the syntax of McCarthy's sentences is biblical in style. For example, "Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no sould save he." On the other hand, the use of figurative language captures and evokes the desolate landscape very well. For instance, "... where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus."
About a third of the way through this book, I felt that I had the measure of it and as I was not enjoying it I should cease reading it any further. Nonetheless, I ploughed on and discovered some passages of great writing. However, the sum of these great passages does not make up for a whole book that could be called great.
Disappointing: Not as engrossing as other McCarthy Novels June 13, 2008
I have already read several Cormac McCarthy novels and found them all thoroughly entertaining, emotional and thought provoking. I am sorry to say that I found 'Blood Meridian' quite disappointing; in fact, I stopped reading it just over 3/4 of the way in as I was getting bored with it and just couldn't be bothered to finish it. Despite it clearly being a work of McCarthy, with his fantastic descriptive techniques and conversational style of writing, the story just did not hold my attention or provoke my interest in the same way his other works did.
The plot covers an ever-changing selection of male characters, with a few that are prominent and have an enduring-presence, who are involved in the 'Indian' wars of the 1840s in West Texas and Mexico. They are essentially mercenaries, except that there is very little discrimination as to who, or what, is killed nor whether a reward will actually be forthcoming for their 'work'.
There is an extreme level of violence, a lot of it is senseless and unprovoked and it goes largely unexplained or justified. Whilst I was not put-off by that violence (or lack of reasoning for it), it was essentially this and other repetitive occurrences which dominate the plot, with nothing else of enough note happening to maintain my attention. I believe the main premise of the novel is to highlight that indiscriminate and brutal violence, but I don't think that was good enough reason to justify it being fictionalised with no other significant elements to the tale.
For me, the magic of McCarthy's writing is that despite there rarely being an all-encompassing plot, an interest is maintained by a combination of being interested in his fascinating characters and/or the wry humour associated with their story.
Blood Meridian has one interesting character (The Judge), but he does appear until some way into the novel nor feature prominently enough from then on (despite him clearly evolving into the central character); crucially, I did not feel any connection or real interest in the fate of any of the characters.
Yes, as I have already alluded to, the identifiable methods and style McCarthy uses to describe the action are present and occasionally breathtaking. But halfway through the novel, whilst I was still engrossed, I realised the monotony of what was happening and slowly (and reluctantly) realised that this was not classic McCarthy; I think there is good work inside this novel, but it needs to be about half the length.
If I compare this book to my favourite McCarthy work, 'Suttree' (see my Amazon review), there is no contest. When I note that Blood Meridian was published in 1985 and Suttree in 1989, I can only presume that McCarthy matured as a writer at some point between those dates.
By all means, give Blood Meridian a try to experience a unique and noteworthy writing-style describing dramatic violence and traumatic life, but don't expect the story to develop much from what is outlined within the first few pages.....
My recommendation is to read Suttree instead !
Not for me thanks May 30, 2008
Ok so there is great prose and a dark story line but it is so extreme what is the point? I struggled to get into this book and could not make any connections with the characters; it was difficult to understand why they were doing what they were doing and where they were going. The coincidences were also beyond credible. I would give it a bye and read "No country" or "the road"
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