Blood Meridian: Book Review

“That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”

I finished reading Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy a couple days ago. This is considered to be Cormac McCarthy's magnum opus, a novel set in the mid nineteenth century. It follows the historical Glanton gang that infamously traveled throughout the west scalping native Americans and committing other wanton atrocities. Like every McCarthy novel, it is extremely violent and nihilistic, and is well known for that fact.

Overall, I cannot say that I enjoyed the book all that much. I do not regret reading it, but it was rather tough to get through, with the combination of prose style, lack of characterization, and non-existent plot. I had to get the audiobook about twenty or so percent through to help me push through; finding the willpower to push through was actually kind of difficult. I almost DNFed it, too, but decided to stick with it.

Overall (No Spoilers)

As I said, while I did not enjoy the book that much, I did not regret reading it. This is because it sparked a lot of thinking on my part about the writing process and what I like about the books I read. I don't think this review is best suited by breaking it up into likes and dislikes, since my opinions on everything seems to meld together, so I will instead do a discussion broken up into prose, character, and plot.

Prose

The first thing I will talk about is the prose. I felt rather mixed about the prosework, and it made me think a bit more deeply about what I like to have in my prose. It's also worth noting that the prose in this novel is much denser and more elaborate than in No Country For Old Men. In No Country it was very sparse, apparently having been adapted from a screenplay that McCarthy had written. I learned this back when I read No Country, and the differences are quite stark now that I have been exposed to them directly.

Blood Meridian has elaborate prose that is beautiful and even enviable in some ways. In particular, I remember one chapter from near the beginning, where the main character is traveling through the countryside, and McCarthy's descriptions painted a stunning picture with vivid visuals.

At the same time, I've become convinced that many literary fiction novels rely too heavily on narrative summary and lengthy descriptions of the world, likely because they think purple prose makes it all worth it. Yet, I don't exactly see the appeal. Obviously, if you find that some narrative summary is necessary to communicate some events rather than putting the readers into a specific scene, then some purple prose is desirable. All stories have it to some degree, and reading stories that have sparse descriptions or are severely lacking in creativity leaves something to be desired. However, when it is not only a feature of the writing, rather than an occasional fallback, but is also the one of the appeals of the book, then I think my priorities in writing are too far misaligned with the author. In other words, I can enjoy a pretty description of some landscape, but when it's done again and again and again, and there is not much else there to grasp onto, it becomes quite tedious.

Another thing I want to talk about is the long sentences. From the outset, this is rather difficult to talk about, given that the very definition of the thing being referenced is relative. What is a long sentence? How many words, how many lines? I don't know. What I do know is that the long sentences in this book are beyond exorbitant. Here is a fun example:

There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse.

 

There is much that could be said about this. First, I think the longest sentence in my current novel is half this length. I thought the occasional long sentence was acceptable if you justify it. The occasional indulgence is fun. As I mentioned with purple prose and narrative summary, I can enjoy it, but when you are smothered with it, it ruins the novelty and makes the writing hard to parse and hard to enjoy. Then again, if the sentences are well done, then they are well done. There is no hardline distinction between too many long sentences and not enough, and there is likewise no hardline distinction between what is simply long and what is too long. I think a much better standard would be to ask whether the sentence is obviously a series of independent clauses stitched together. How many ideas are being communicated in this sentence? How easy is it to parse the meaning?

Now, McCarthy's long sentences were nowhere near as ugly as some I have seen. The worst have convoluted syntax that frustrates comprehension, making you wonder whether there even is an independent clause smothered underneath all those words. For example, this is apparently the first line in a book:

Back when my parents and I lived in Bushwick in a building sandwiched between a drug house and another drug house, the only difference being that the dealers in the one drug house were also the users and so more unpredictable, and in the other the dealers were never the users and so more shrewd—back in those days, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment so subpar that we woke up with flattened cockroaches in our bedsheets, sometimes three or four stuck on our elbows, and once I found fourteen of them pressed to my calves, and there was no beauty in shaking them off, though we strove for grace, swinging our arms in the air as if we were ballerinas.

 

McCarthy's is less appalling. Instead, his approach uses the strategies I mention in my No Country review: polysyndetons and the minimal usage of commas. I can start by extending an olive branch. I did not see the point of using this style when I read No Country, given that it utterly lacked these long sentences. However, now that I see the style in the format of these long sentences, I can understand why he adopts this approach. His long sentence is far more readable than the syntactic obscenity I posted above. This is because he is just linking independent clauses together with the word "and" to sandwich them all together. This makes it more readable.

However, it also makes the reasons not to use long sentences more obvious. There are now obvious ways to break up the sentence, and that just make me wonder why it was not done. In the McCarthy sentence, it is obvious that the last part about "humans on fire" belongs in its own sentence, as it communicates its own idea. As is the case for the first part ending with "brained or shot." Even the core part of the sentence uses so many words to communicate the image. For fun, I decided to rewrite the sentence in my own way to make it more readable:

Several Mexican slaves were in the camp, and they ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot. One of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand. He squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn, bashing their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew. Beyond him, humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives. A young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse.

 

I was immediately possessed with the possibilities when I started this. I wasn't sure if I should discard the use of polysyndetons and keep the commas to a minimum or simply break up the sentence. I decided to remove them where I thought they worked less well; and without the long sentence, they often seemed less necessary. As I said, his usage of this writing technique is less easy to understand without long sentences, so I predictably didn't think it worked when I started to break it up. My preferences are towards my rewrite not only because of the shorter sentences that keep the separate ideas apart, but because the syntax changes up and keeps it from being repetitive.

All things considered, his prose style is not for me.

Characters

My perspective on characters is a whole lot less detailed, I think. Though since I have a lot on my mind today, that might change as I go.

As usual, I will start with the positives. I liked the Judge. He wasn't complex in his motivations, but I don't think all characters need to be. His primary purpose was obviously thematic. The Judge was meant to be unsettling. He was meant to be creepy, and McCarthy achieved that in spades. And the audiobook provided a whole new dimension to the character, too, with the voice given to him making him sound like a nobleman. The core appeal of his character is the juxtaposition between his erudition and utterly uncivilized behavior. And the fact that he is massive, completely bald, and pale, just makes it all the better. I still can't get over McCarthy's description that he is like an enormous infant. Lol.

"The freedom of birds is an insult to me."

And that's it. The rest of the characters are nothing. They are interchangeable. There really is nothing to set any of them apart. One major part of this is the lack of interior monologue that also is a feature in No Country. I did not like it in that book, and I did not like it in this one either. In fact, throughout the reading of this, I was thinking that this was the primary cause of my dislike of McCarthy. It probably is. But there might be reasons to reject this in its strong form. I have heard others reject Blood Meridian because they had no connection to the characters, but then say they liked The Road because they did have that connection communicated through the dialogue of the characters.

And that is possible. I will try The Road only for that reason. But that also allows me to expand on my criticisms of this book. There isn't much dialogue to expand on any of the characters. McCarthy does basically nothing to build the character of any of the cardboard pieces walking throughout this novel. Except for the Judge. The main character is supposedly the main character. In a Stanford lecture series I watched on this book, I think it was mentioned that there are 75 page stretches where the Kid is not even mentioned. But even when he is on the page, he isn't. Because he rarely talks, and when there is dialogue, it's not to build his or anyone's character. Except for the Judge. Lol. Though even the Judge's speeches are more to voice themes, and so the character building there is just incidental. And his character is far from complex, anyway.

I laughed during that Stanford lecture when the teacher mentioned the lack of interiority. And I think there really is value in having access to these things because it helps provide nuance that could not otherwise be communicated by simply showing action. For example, there is a scene that is a small spoiler that was talked about in the lecture. The Judge at one point is playing with a young Native American child, only to kill the child a few minutes later. A cardboard cutout named Toadvine reacted negatively to this, putting his gun to the Judge's head. The Judge is unfazed and tells him to pull the trigger or put the gun away. Toadvine complies, putting away his gun. The teacher mentions that we have no idea why he did this. It's obvious why he pulled the gun, but why not just shoot him? As I suggested earlier, we don't necessarily need interiority, and I technically don't even do it for the majority of my characters in my own novel, but there is also no dialogue or any other scenes to clarify his motivations. The Kid also finds himself in a similar situation, and we also have no idea why he decided not to kill the Judge.

This scene I described is one of the few scenes that actually provides some distinction between characters. I guess Toadvine is not as nasty as the Judge. But beyond that, none of the characters are distinguished from each other in terms of what they say and do. Except for the Judge. Each and every last one is interchangeable, all partaking in the massacres and killing with nothing to set them apart.

This next part of my critique bleeds over into the theme, but I'll keep it in the character section because it is a theme about the characters. One of the obvious themes in McCarthy's work is how violence and war are just part of our nature, with the Judge calling it God. This works, though I am left to wonder whether more can be built off this idea. How about answering the question of why? Why is it that people do this? There are different levels of explanation, and the one I am thinking about is the character specific reasons. Why is the Kid partaking in this? Why is Toadvine there? How about Jackson? Glanton? I'm not saying each character has to have some elaborate Freudian explanation. Side characters are one-dimensional as a rule. What I am saying is that there should be something, and there should be some variation in that something.

Plot

So, the section on characters did turn out much longer than I expected. I won't try to predict what might happen in this section. As I mentioned before. The plot in this book is basically nonexistent. They travel from place to place with slight setting changes, like post-massacre scenery, or in-media-res massacre scenery. The story climaxes at a point where the Glanton gang has taken control of a ford, which made things a bit more interesting, but that was such a short part.

What else is there to say? Well, I personally don't think plot should be considered wholly on its own. I care more about character more, overall, but I think that both plot and character are made even better by the intersection of plot and character. Consider Game of Thrones (spoilers for both the books and the show). The story is both character driven and plot driven. Many events that happen in that story, especially the major ones, are due to the specific characters that are there. Ned Stark would not have been executed if Joffrey had not been the King. The Red Wedding would not have happened if Walder Frey had not been the Lord who was betrayed by Robb. The events that drive the plot forward don't just happen. The characters embody the plot, and define it. The plot happens because of who the characters are.

Incidentally, this is why I'm not super impressed with some of Stephen King's characters. That is his focus and his strong suit. But he also cuts out plot. And I think this seriously undercuts his ability to make compelling characters. Larry Underwood was interesting in The Stand, as were Stu and Frannie, but since that story barely had any plot and because their characters barely defined that plot in the same way that Walder Frey did, they will never be as memorable.

This was admittedly a tangent, but I was thinking about this a whole lot as I was reading this book, because I knew I didn't just want a clear plot driving the story forward, but also characters who embody said plot. If the story reads like a series of loosely connected circumstances, King's oh-so-special character and circumstances, then why am I reading?

Blood Meridian is even worse. There is no character, no plot, and no intersection of the two. I guess the prose, the themes, and the allegories are what lead people to hold it up as a literary great. But, then, I had serious issues with all of that, too.

Overall, I was rather disappointed, though the length of this post reflects all the introspection this book sparked in me. I don't want that to influence my rating, so barring uncontrolled bias, it won't reflect any of that. I think I will give the book a 2/10.

Outro (Mild Spoilers)

This is my favorite quote from the book, and it is somewhat spoilery as it is the last paragraph in the book, ignoring the epilogue:

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.