No one has
accused Blood Meridian of being an easy read. Many people I have talked to have started the
book several times, only to put it down unfinished, and that makes perfect
sense to me. The opening is carried by
McCarthy’s wonderful prose, the beauty and the starkness of his language. The world of 1849 frontier America is new and
striking to us, and the cruelty and combativeness of the world’s inhabitants are
fascinating. But somewhere in the middle
of the Mexican landscape the narrative drive of the novel hums so low that
there is little power to carry your forward.
Scenes of carnage and horror roll by with neither comment nor clear
purpose and any faith that the novel is headed anywhere you want to go is
tested and, clearly for many, killed altogether.
If you find
yourself suffering in this same way and wondering why everyone else seems to
have such a high opinion of the book, I recommend that you plow forward,
because it is really the last 70 pages that make this books so powerful and so
memorable, because the greatness at the heart of Blood Meridian is the
enigmatic and magnetic Judge Holden.
Aside from the judge, Blood Meridian has no real characters, by
which I mean dynamic and fleshed out actors.
Instead of characters, McCarthy gives us roles: the kid, the expriest,
the fool, the judge, the captain. These
roles are more suited to a morality play or a deck of tarot cards than to a
novel, and the characters have all the dimension of a well-thumbed card used to
tell the fortune of a person, or in this case, a country. These characters do have names and basic
relationships, but I got the distinct impression that that is only because of
the historicity of McCarthy’s tale.
Characters who have been traveling with Glanton’s gang for presumably
the whole of the journey will appear in one scene and then disappear just as
readily.
Oh, but the
judge! Now there is a character you can
sink your fears into! From the moment we
meet him in the first chapter, he is the standout character of the novel. His intelligence, his eloquence, his desire
to manipulate and cause mayhem with no concern for the resulting carnage—he’s
the man who grabs your imagination. And
it’s really not until the last third of the novel that the judge begins to be
revealed to us through his philosophical lectures, so you need to keep trudging
through the desert sands of the middle of McCarthy’s novel to be rewarded with
the full weight of this phenomenal literary creation.
So that’s my
plea to those of you who have not read the novel or who have tried and
failed. My rest of this short review
will contain SPOILERS, so don’t read
on unless you have finished the novel already.
The dramatic
turn in the novel after the Yumas slaughtered Glanton and his gang
simultaneously took me by surprise and felt exactly right. It was unclear to me why the judge was
suddenly a threat to the kid and the expriest after they had been on the same
team for nearly the whole of the novel.
But at the same time, I fell right in line with their fear and cast a
backwards eye on the story to see the possibility of the judge coming after
them like a juggernaut. I loved when the
judge addressed the kid while the latter hid in the bones of the desert and
said to him. “You alone were mutinous.
You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.” We never saw this clemency for the heathen
even though we saw him display the slightest sympathy for his fellow travelers,
such as when he helped brown with the arrow through his leg, or when he allowed
Shelby to live while fleeing from General Elias’s men. These are hardly grand acts of mercy and
morality, but they were enough to upset the judge.
Similarly, I
loved when the judge asks the man at the end of the novel, “Was it always your
idea, he said, that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?” I had wondered why the kid mostly disappears
after he hooks up with Glanton and the judge, and this one statement makes his
receding into the background both carry weight and make narrative sense. In addition, the word “recognized” seems to
carry special import in a novel where names seem to play a significant
role. As I said earlier, names are for
the most part an afterthought in the novel, so I was struck when the judge
called Toadvine “Louis” after the massacre of Glanton’s gang when the judge
wanted to buy Toadvine’s hat. Who knew
Toadvine had any other name? Apparently,
the judge did, and this is not surprising when we think about the judge’s notebook
and his determination to map out the order of the world in an attempt to master
it. As he says, “Whatever in creation
exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” Nearly all the first names that appear in the
novel are made known to us because the judge has revealed it, because it is the
judge’s act of control to know.
Perhaps that
is why the kid remains nameless to us.
The closest the judge can come to a name is “Blasarius,” which is
apparently an obscure legal term for an arson, referring presumably to the fire
that the kid and Toadvine set in the hotel in the first chapter of the
novel. The judge never has his name and
therefore never has control over the kid.
Which takes us to the ambiguous end of the kid in the jakes of Fort
Griffin. What acts does the judge
perform there to know and master the kid?
We will never know, only that it is a fate we would not wish upon
anyone.
There is of
course much more to say and much more to ponder, but who am I to bore you with
talking. I’d love to hear instead what
you think.
