McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. Random House, New York, 1985. F; 8/23.

I have to count this violent monster among the Big Books of my experience. The list would include Infinite Jest, A Book of Memories, some of Nabokov’s stories, Middlemarch, War and Peace. It’s a bit reluctant of a comparison because McCarthy is (as usual) so focused on and saturated with killing and moral nightmares in the narrative events. But here he drags such breathtaking beauty and solemn glorious truth out of all the murder and deceit that the reading experience riveted my attention through to the end. I’d say the breadth and reach of this story could be capable of redecorating a moral interior, if you’re in that frame of mind.

It’s loosely historical in its narrative. Mexico and the United States were complex in their relationship in the mid-19^th century, Mexico especially chaotic and lawless by later standards. We are told many of the characters are based on famous scoundrels at large in those days leading roving groups of similar wild guys, under the guise of some military purpose, basically scalping, raping, thieving, and murdering their way across the country, alternately heroic and rewarded and then in turn themselves chopped up and fed to buzzards and wolves. They are stinking, filthy, obscene, greedy, and human. Extremely terrible things have been happening to people forever and still happen today. But the blithe open acceptability of it is somehow both insulating and also more horrifying looking back from almost 200 years later.

“The kid” (never named) leaves home in Tennessee at fourteen and encounters “Judge” Holden, the other main character. The Judge convincingly but falsely publicly accuses a preacher of raping children and animals and later brags about the falsehood in a bar. The kid fights off adversaries and then joins a group of filibusters (not long-winded congressmen but an armed gang of American troublemakers in Mexico) who meet in one of the most bizarre and startling scenes of the story a huge army of wildly clothed and behaved Comanche warriors who decimate them. The kid survives and then escapes jail in Mexico by joining anti-Indian fighters led by one John Glanton, all paid for by scalps.

While this group murders unarmed Indian villages, Mexicans, and even soldiers without mercy the kid hears about the Judge (whom he remembers) joining and rescuing the group from hundreds of Indians by manufacturing explosives from available odds and ends and brilliantly outwitting them. Glanton’s group takes over in the southern US a commercial river crossing where more killing and deceit leaves many of them dead, while the kid and one other character barely escape to San Diego from a deadly standoff with the Judge.

Time passes and the kid now middle-aged re-encounters the Judge in a bar and the two face off again in a bizarre and vicious conclusion.

Main characters are few, along with half a dozen three-dimensional others in supporting roles, all men. The kid seems pitched as an everyman survivor, but his anonymity and religious and personal agnosticism for me left him strangely significantly featureless. It’s as though he sees (and participates in) everything but stays persistently sceptical. He takes no point of view but that of his plain self. He’s a quiet opponent and foil for the Judge (“You’re crazy.”) Is he autobiographical? If so there he is like the rest of the furniture of the story, but never described. We don’t see his face.

The Judge is a sophisticated monster.

…a man of gigantic size … He stood six foot six in his moccasins, had a large, fleshy frame, a dull, tallow-colored face destitute of hair and all expression, always cool and collected. But when a quarrel took place and blood shed, his hog-like eyes would gleam with a sullen ferocity worthy of the countenance of a fiend.

His evil is comprehensive: spiritual, intellectual, academic, physical. He speaks multiple languages, talks circles around everyone, keeps detailed scientific notes, invents instruments of war. He likes to consider games of chance for life-and-death: “What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate.” This Judge considers himself a god because of his unique knowledge but assumes the necessity of winning fights to the death and the absolutely fundamental nature of war. His credo:

The truth (is) … a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

John Glanton, leader of the Indian-killers, is based on a historic character and is an effective and ruthless captain. His death – cut in half from top to bottom – is foreshadowed when we are told of a wife and child in Texas who he will never see again:

He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him … and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since…

Somehow McCarthy gives this story, so violent that it has been called “unfilmable” (this year another attempt may be made), enormous heavy-weighted emotional and moral impact. Breathtaking lyrical writing and human truth are fearlessly twisted into the catastrophes of the plot. I love the fitting archaic style:

The advent of the riders (was) bruited by scurvid curs that howled woundedly and slank among the crumbling walls.

(A) buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child’s toy swung on a string…

and

(A) pair of buzzards began to trot off across the sand with their wings outheld like soiled chorines, their boiledlooking heads jerking obscenely.

… small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon.

My Kindle dictionary regularly couldn’t define, sometimes several times on a page, archaic or rare words reminding me of the vocabulary in Infinite Jest: coulee, swale, gaitered, ricks, abscised, archimandrite, baldric, keelsons, holothurians… Each chapter is prefaced by a noncommittal objective catalogue of its events, which helps us back into the 19th century.

The shock of the Comanche attack on the American filibusters is dazzling. At the risk of over-prolonging this here’s the description:

… there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant.

Philosophy and religion are aired regularly, often ironically, often blasted into oblivion.

The Judge’s metaphysic is a form of nominalism: “… in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.” He also says, “Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right.”

It would be hard to imagine a more terrifying scourge of Christianity than a description of a church where the congregation had been massacred:

… a dead Christ in a glass bier lay broken in the chancel floor. The murdered lay in a great pool of their communal blood. It had set up into a sort of pudding crossed everywhere with the tracks of wolves or dogs and along the edges it had dried and cracked into a burgundy ceramic. Blood lay in dark tongues on the floor and blood grouted the flagstones and ran in the vestibule where the stones were cupped from the feet of the faithful and their fathers before them and it had threaded its way down the steps and dripped from the stones among the dark red tracks of the scavengers.

Obviously a world is here being described as filled with atrocities where everything sacred and held dear is destroyed, ending with a character like the Judge, apparently ageless, singing and dancing. Here! it says. This all exists. But this story’s dramatic grip and the reason it survives is the redeeming description independent of what’s described. And clear statements show the author’s struggle with terrible unanswered moral questions can’t be denied.

This is a giant thing whose existence pushes aside two-dimensional ordinary perceptions of what the real story, ours, was when we opened the book. Could we have been settling for a kind of foolish simplicity? Of course there are right and wrong moments for real change. But when they come McCarthy’s picture helps quietly open ambiguity enough to see that dreadful things and beautiful are maybe not opposites and for sure that they are equally real. At the same time and sometimes even in the same place.

Not your relaxing sunshine vacation read for sure. Approach with caution and an open mind.

9.?/9.8