I just put down Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. I should have known better than to go back to
McCarthy. His books are bleak and shattering and compeling and horrific and you want to put them
down because there is no way you can keep reading, your poor, frail emotions can only take so much
of a beating, but yet you keep reading because you have to know how it ends, you have to know what
becomes of all these terrible, lawless, bloodthirsty men and you just have to know, you just have to
see it happen, you have signed a covenant without realising it.
Blood Meridian is a western, I guess,
if you need a genre label, in that it is set in the old west and there are cowboys and indians, and
laws are made through the barrel of a gun, but it is not a western because there are no good guys, bad
guys, white horses or governemnt cavalry saving the day. It is awful, vicious people doing awful vicious
things to other awful, vicious people. It is much more the great american novel, if you can consider
that a genre, great men making themselves with no help from god or country or anyone, just by strength
of will and contempt for all living things. This is not a happy book. Good things do not happen and if
they did, there would be no good people for them to happen to. The protaganist, just called the kid,
is that, a kid alone in the world who falls in with lawless mercenaries who scour the deadly southern
deserts for indians to scalp and lay waste to anything in everything in their way.
The landscape is as
central a character as any. It exists to destroy as surely as glanton's men or any apaches do, though
obviously it is indifferent to who's bones should bleach in the sun, indian or white man or horse or
donkey. The men are all killers and they share no love for any besides themselves. Self preservation is
all the counts.The kid kills with them and drinks with them though we see him with the only spark of
what I'll call humanity though even then I suspect I might be wrong. There are others like Toadvine,
who at least puts the puppies out of their misery and the expriest who tells the kid to kill the judge
but like everyone else in the book they end up dead.
The judge is of course the most interesting character. The philosopher-warrior, hairless and often
naked, he is sufficent at every thing he does, and gives off the aura of a god among men. The books ends
and he is laughing that he will live forever and you do not doubt it for he is hardly a man at all.
There is a lot i do not know about the book and the judge is the largest mystery. He is a towering
question mark to all those inside the book and I assume all those who are reading it as well. He is
insane, of course, as he is told many times, but that is because they do not, and I do not, understand
him at all. he says during one of his speeches, that everything that exists without his knowledge exists
without his consent and that sticks with me.
