“Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy is the American epic in its’ truest form. McCarthy’s prose style has been called biblical by many critics. He is an author that must be read by young men, especially his book Blood Meridian. No words are wasted in this powerful yet poignant novel about mankind. I find McCarthy’s direct writing style to be particularly refreshing in the modern writing scene. Set in the American Southwest and Mexico in the mid 1800s, it is a violent look into that bloody time period. The characters range from a runaway kid who is the main character, to an ex-priest named Tobin, to a murderous pedophelic renaissance man named the Judge, to the war monger gang leader Glanton and many more colorful characters fill this book from beginning to end. “Blood Meridian” emphasizes the nature of man, his dark heart, fate and war. All topics that we don’t like to think about or accept. The Judge’s quote, “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.” That quote stuck with me as I pondered our species. We idolize war, our countries were claimed through warfare, we watch movies about it and the news covers it daily. This book argues that our true god is war. Towards the end of the book the Judge says again, “Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war , who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.” Another major point of the book is fate and its’ indifferent nature towards mankind. When the kid is lost after a battle, he is found by Mexican cowboys. After giving him much needed water the leader of the group says, “When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.” McCarthy’s philosophy comes out in that quote about fate’s role in the human experience. Another aspect of the book I loved was the way McCarthy described scenes in true wordsmith fashion, “They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard , the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark . They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.”I was able to read Samuel Chamberlain’s memoir “My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue” that inspired McCarthy’s novel. It is very interesting because many of the characters in the novel are based on actual people referenced in Chamberlain’s memoir. If you can get your hands on a copy of Chamberlain’s memoir than it is an excellent companion to Blood Meridian but I had to search through the archives at my university to find it. This book is worth your time because it offers an unfiltered look into this violent time period in American history.
Written by Michael McPhail
Cormac McCarthy
Brains and Brawn 