Blood Meridian: Brutality at its Finest

Review by Adam Beckett

A bush of dead babies-unprovoked genocidal massacre-naked yoga-the American Dream-The Judge.

“All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker and in the night they could hear the drum of rain miles away on the prairie. They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the hordes like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal of the harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of the guns. Mad jackhares started and checked in the blue glare and high among those clanging crags jokin roehawks crouched in their feathers or cracked a yellow eye at the thunder underfoot.”

I began my Cormac McCarthy obsession just last year when I read ‘The Road’, and following the advice of a friend I decided to read the rest of his work in publication order.

By the time I’d gotten to Blood Meridian I was already enchanted by Cormac’s bloodlust and dark perceptions on the world. It seems to me that his ability to take themes of cruelty and make them beautiful is what engendered his status as literary legend among Southern and American Gothic fans.

Illustration by Gérard DuBois for the Folio Society edition of Blood Meridian

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‘Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West’ is an anti-Western. Take away the heroism and the American Dream of the Old West and what you have is a savage, racist hatred. Cormac delights in telling us about just how cruel people can be, there’s nothing new on that front, but in the case of Blood Meridian it is done so on a level unpreceded by his previous work.

Meet Judge Holden. Seemingly barely human, The Judge is what people might think of as “Evil Incarnate” and too brutal to be real, though what you may not know is that he is based on a real person of the same name. As he dances, studies, and philosophises his way into justifying mass execution, all while exuding an infinitely calm demeanour, he is given an almost supernatural exoticism. From the paleness of his skin and tallness of his stature, we are at first merely teased of his mystique. It is later in the novel that we begin unveiling his nature, and by the end of the book he is cemented in our minds as the worst man to ever have lived.

“Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”

Cormac McCarthy’s Faulkner-like Prose acts as a kind of varnish to the books’ evil. It is through poetic, flowy passages that we feel a kind of disconnect from the harshest parts of what is happening; as though Cormac is holding our hand through the storm and saying “look, there’s death everywhere, but see how beautiful the rain is, see the mountains and the sadness as one thing; a kind of melancholy that is the basis of our nature.” It gives his work a tone which I find most important when discussing evil: evil is real, observe it, accept it, then ignore it, for there is nothing you can do to stop it. Call me fatalistic, you’d be right.

To summarise I will say that I think Blood Meridian is one of the most important pieces of literature ever to have been written. You might find its contents disturbing, but the gutwrench is vital for understanding the true way of the world. America’s bloody history cannot be ignored, its foundations were built on relentless cruelty, and while it makes for a solid read it is also important to remember that this is us, this is what we humans are, playing at war without scruples, even today.

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”