I used to be a very heavy reader, but of late, I’ve slowed down a bit. True, much of it comes from reading trade paperbacks more than novels, but then there’s my job, the podcast (which I really need to schedule again soon), and then this blog. That all takes time.
But it’s a new year now, and for that, I I figured I should put some effort into finishing the books I had left half-read in 2019. The first such book that I finally got off my ass (or, technically, onto my ass) and finished was Cormac McCarthy’s anti-Western Blood Meridian.
Blood Meridian is, ostensibly, the story of “the kid,” a nameless youth from Tennessee sometime in the 1850s. He leaves home around the age of 14, heads west, and eventually joins up with the historic Glanton Gang. They hunt scalps for fun and profit, and for these guys, “fun” might actually be the right word. These are violent people, and all indications is they were pretty violent from the start.
McCarthy’s novel, with minimal punctuation, doesn’t really have much in the way of a plot. It reminds me a bit of Moby-Dick, and I didn’t care much for Moby-Dick. That said, I did like this one. That comes down, more than anything, to the character of the judge.
The judge, sometimes called Judge Holden, is one of the big reasons I read this book. I read Harold Bloom’s massive book on the plays of William Shakespeare last year, and the only character in modern fiction he had much of anything at all to say about what Judge Holden, and that was to compare the character to Othello‘s Iago as the epitome of chaotic evil. And that more or less describes the judge to a tee.
The judge is, perhaps, not really human. A tall, pale, hairless man who seems comfortable in any environment and who always seems to be present when bad things happen. Every member of the Glanton gang encountered him at some point before the gang formed. The kid, for example, first saw him suddenly accuse a wandering preacher of multiple crimes, enough to fire up a lynch mob to go after the man, but when asked later how the judge knew the preacher committed all those crimes, the judge just laughed and said he’d never seen the man in his life, implying the judge made the whole thing up for his own personal amusement, even if it led to the death of an innocent man. The judge is a fascinating character, mysterious, and if we’re doing the Moby-Dick comparison, he is the white whale of the novel.
And that may be the best way to explain Blood Meridian. It’s mysterious, impressionistic, and suggests the nature of mankind isn’t pretty. The Glanton gang rides through Mexico, collecting scalps from the Apaches for profit, but they don’t limit themselves to, say, young warriors. They’ll take a scalp from anyone they can pass for an Apache scalp, and that’s when they aren’t behaving like destructive savages anytime they stay in a town. Does this come because of the judge? Not likely, but even the characters who seem to resist the judge in small ways are no saints.
Acting as a dark treatise on violence and the nature of evil, this is one nihilistic book. When the best philosophy comes from a man who may not be a man saying that war is the only way to really see how the world works, and how anyone can die a horrible death at any time, well, this isn’t the sort of book to make you feel good about yourself. This isn’t light or easy reading, but it is very much worth the trip.
Grade: A
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