Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, the ‘bloodiest book ever written’

What you will read below is the article published by the Washington Post on March 13, 1985 signed by Jonathan Yardley on the writer’s fifth novel Cormac McCarthywho died yesterday in Santa Fe at the age of 89.

To start the day bright and cheerful, here’s a little taste from the new novel by Cormac McCarthy: “The slain lay in a large pool of common blood. It had solidified into a sort of pudding marked with wolf or dog tracks, and at the edges it had dried and cracked like burgundy pottery. There was blood that stretched in dark tongues across the floor and there was blood that covered the paving stones like mortar and ran into the porch where the stones had been dug by the feet of the faithful and by those of their fathers before them, and it had flowed down the steps and dripped from the stones among the dark red traces of the ravagers”.

I knew you’d like it; she goes very well with orange juice. So, how about something to mix with corn flakes? This should be fine: “The dead lay in the shallows like the victims of a marine catastrophe, or strewn along the salty bank, blood and entrails everywhere. The riders dragged the bodies out of the bloody water of the lake, and in the growing light of dawn the foam that lapped the beach was a pale pink. They wandered among the dead, cutting off the long black locks with a knife and leaving the victims with flayed skulls, bizarre under their bloody caps. The scattered horses of the herd galloped off along the fetid bank and disappeared into the smoke, only to gallop back again. Some men splashed in the red water striking the dead for no reason, and others lay on the beach copulating with the clubbed bodies of dead or dying girls. One of the Delawares passed with a collection of heads, like a grotesque peddler on his way to market, and he kept his hair twisted around his wrist as the heads hung and whirled.”

If you are Vampire, or Dracula, you will love “Blood Meridian” from the first page to the last, because it really is “a bloody explosion, a stinking scene”. What a shame Sam Peckinpah isn’t around anymore, because he sure would have loved to make it – although there’s at least the chance that even the director of “The Wild Bunch” and “Straw Dogs” finds Blood Meridian a bit too heavy for his stomach. I kid you not: this has to be the bloodiest novel ever written. The passages quoted above are, to be honest, a bit bland; respect for others forced me to refrain from mentioning those involving the removal of eyeballs, the cutting of genitals and other details of life in the Old West – or, to be more precise, life in the Old West as portrayed in the imagination of Cormac McCarthy, an imagination that seems, at first blush, a little feverish.

This story, even if “story” is perhaps too generous a description, deals with a young man from Tennessee, known to us only as “the boy”, who “can neither read nor write and already harbors in him the taste of senseless violence. At the age of 14 he leaves his home and heads west, killing pretty much anyone or anything he encounters. Over the course of his travels he embarks on various exploits, most of which involve the killing of Mexicans and/or Apaches, sometimes both. All this is described to the smallest detail. Eventually the boy finds himself in the employ of a pair of particularly obnoxious gentlemen, John Glanton and Judge Holden, who are harvesting the scalps of Apaches in the service of a Mexican governor. This leads to many more kills – splat! powee! oomph! yippee! – and a certain amount of amateurish philosophizing by Judge Holden, who, among other things, argues that the only man who has truly lived is “the man who offered himself whole to the blood of war, which is been to the bottom of the pit and saw the horror all round and learned in the end that it speaks to his deepest heart.

From this messy novel it’s not clear whether Cormac McCarthy himself believes it, but the panache with which he portrays the carnage suggests so. What is even less clear, however, is what the point of all this might be. If McCarthy’s goal is to demythologize the Old West, then it can only be said that he has taken the myth from one extreme to the other. He also wrote a novel in which everything seems to happen, but nothing actually happens. A group of men ride for a while, camp for a while, philosophize for a while, kill for a while. It all takes place in a day’s work, but it’s definitely a slow day.

Copyright Washington Post