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4.01 AVERAGE
4.01 AVERAGE
DNF'd at 30%
This book didn't grab me the way I wanted it to, which is a damn shame because I know this book is amazing! I know that so many people love it, but I don't know, it just wasn't for me.
This book didn't grab me the way I wanted it to, which is a damn shame because I know this book is amazing! I know that so many people love it, but I don't know, it just wasn't for me.
adventurous
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Great writing, fantastic symbolism… but unengaging characters…
This is a bleak and bloody story, well written, with symbolism lining every page. However, I couldn’t connect with any of the characters. The writing, which successfully conveyed the cold, merciless, and brutal world, also created flat, unengaging characters who, despite trying, I couldn’t become invested in.
The Judge – the antagonist of the story – is by far the most interesting character, but is more a symbol of evil, than an actual character you can become invested in.
If you want a gory and ruthless Western, then this is the book for you. If you’re the sort of reader who needs an emotional connection with the characters to enjoy a book, I’d give it a miss.
This is a bleak and bloody story, well written, with symbolism lining every page. However, I couldn’t connect with any of the characters. The writing, which successfully conveyed the cold, merciless, and brutal world, also created flat, unengaging characters who, despite trying, I couldn’t become invested in.
The Judge – the antagonist of the story – is by far the most interesting character, but is more a symbol of evil, than an actual character you can become invested in.
If you want a gory and ruthless Western, then this is the book for you. If you’re the sort of reader who needs an emotional connection with the characters to enjoy a book, I’d give it a miss.
adventurous
challenging
dark
sad
tense
slow-paced
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A true masterpiece. It's strange that this was one of the earlier books in McCarthy's career, because it feels like a culmination of the themes he's explored separately in the novels following. A nightmarish conflagration of violence, horror, man, and nature. It seems that over the years after Blood Meridian McCarthy has become slightly more optimistic, as the Border Trilogy, The Road, and even No Country For Old Men carry an undercurrent of hope for redemption amid despair. No such hope exists in Blood Meridian.
I'll talk first about the aesthetic nature of this novel, because it is oft discussed, especially the near-constant and casual violence. McCarthy's typical stark style is on full display here. Maybe to an even stronger extent than it would later be. It shifts tense, from past to present to future. It crystalizes the blasted landscape of the book's setting with minute details, carrying with them the weight of implication of an entire world. The brutality of the people in that world receives the same textual treatment. While the violence of the book is plentiful, the source of its infamy is, I believe, in McCarthy's rendering of it through language.
I personally think The Road had some of the most disturbing occurrences of inhumanity from McCarthy's library. But the language dances around them. They exist mostly in the reader's imagination, made vivid by scant details, like being able to hear an act occur off-screen in a film. Not so in Blood Meridian. The Glanton Gang's acts of cruelty are described with such pointedness, such harshness, such carelessness, that it feels like a bludgeon.
And through every act of the violence dances Judge Holden. A being supernatural, and yet also human, like some conception of an anti-Christ. Divine hatred housed in a mortal frame. He has preternatural knowledge of all things pertaining to the earth, constantly recording and measuring the world around him and writing it in a book. His are the most impactful lines of the novel. One scene in particular stands out in my memory: he is documenting ruins of an ancient civilization in his ledger, and he is asked what he aims to do with his notes and sketches. "The judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man."
Simultaneously he bears knowledge of all things, and hatred for all things. He seems to run counter to the idea that you can't truly understand something without loving it. The Judge expresses the exact opposite sentiment. Reality is not worth loving, not worth saving. In fact, its only purpose is to be destroyed. He represents the ultimate severing of one from the world; a complete rejection of being at all.
I finished reading this book shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, just a few blocks away from where I live. While scrolling social media in the aftermath I was suddenly subjected to the uncensored footage of his death.
It is a simple thing, a man being shot. A narrow thing.
I can see Judge Holden sitting with a man who would kill another, expounding to him the rational motives for such an act. I can see him accompany the man to a rooftop with carnage in his mind. I can see him smiling across the campfire in the night, while a man dies.
This is the world borne in the ink of Blood Meridian. Easily I imagined the story as taking place in some alternate blood-soaked reality, wholly separate from the world I know. But the veil between that world and mine is thin, so thin that it may as well not exist, and now pierced by that narrow thing. There is no veil. They are the same world.
"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."
I'll talk first about the aesthetic nature of this novel, because it is oft discussed, especially the near-constant and casual violence. McCarthy's typical stark style is on full display here. Maybe to an even stronger extent than it would later be. It shifts tense, from past to present to future. It crystalizes the blasted landscape of the book's setting with minute details, carrying with them the weight of implication of an entire world. The brutality of the people in that world receives the same textual treatment. While the violence of the book is plentiful, the source of its infamy is, I believe, in McCarthy's rendering of it through language.
I personally think The Road had some of the most disturbing occurrences of inhumanity from McCarthy's library. But the language dances around them. They exist mostly in the reader's imagination, made vivid by scant details, like being able to hear an act occur off-screen in a film. Not so in Blood Meridian. The Glanton Gang's acts of cruelty are described with such pointedness, such harshness, such carelessness, that it feels like a bludgeon.
And through every act of the violence dances Judge Holden. A being supernatural, and yet also human, like some conception of an anti-Christ. Divine hatred housed in a mortal frame. He has preternatural knowledge of all things pertaining to the earth, constantly recording and measuring the world around him and writing it in a book. His are the most impactful lines of the novel. One scene in particular stands out in my memory: he is documenting ruins of an ancient civilization in his ledger, and he is asked what he aims to do with his notes and sketches. "The judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man."
Simultaneously he bears knowledge of all things, and hatred for all things. He seems to run counter to the idea that you can't truly understand something without loving it. The Judge expresses the exact opposite sentiment. Reality is not worth loving, not worth saving. In fact, its only purpose is to be destroyed. He represents the ultimate severing of one from the world; a complete rejection of being at all.
I finished reading this book shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, just a few blocks away from where I live. While scrolling social media in the aftermath I was suddenly subjected to the uncensored footage of his death.
It is a simple thing, a man being shot. A narrow thing.
I can see Judge Holden sitting with a man who would kill another, expounding to him the rational motives for such an act. I can see him accompany the man to a rooftop with carnage in his mind. I can see him smiling across the campfire in the night, while a man dies.
This is the world borne in the ink of Blood Meridian. Easily I imagined the story as taking place in some alternate blood-soaked reality, wholly separate from the world I know. But the veil between that world and mine is thin, so thin that it may as well not exist, and now pierced by that narrow thing. There is no veil. They are the same world.
"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."
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This is not a book for the faint of heart. Not only because of the regular and graphic descriptions of violence, but also for the sheer obtuse nature of the narrative. You really need to be an active participant in the story McCarthy is trying to tell to grasp the entirety of his vision. Buckle up, pay attention, and watch him dance.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Death, Gore, Gun violence, Racism, Violence, Blood, Murder, War, Injury/Injury detail
