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A review by hernamewaslily
Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
5.0
Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian,’ a western (or anti-western depending on your perspective) set in 1850s that follows a nameless 14-year-old runaway referred to only as “the kid” as he makes his way from Tennessee to the American Southwest. After a failed stint with the Army on a filibustering mission that lands him in jail in Chihuahua, the kid finds himself in the company of a band of outlaws and scalp-hunters called the Glanton Gang and joins them on their mission to scalp as many Apache Indians as possible. Led by Judge Holden, most often referred to simply as “the judge,” a towering, deathly pale, and completely hairless man with a ruthless attitude towards those he tortures and murders (he believes that war is man acting on his natural instinct), the gang are soon taken to killing and scalping any supposed enemy they come across.
This novel is an incredibly violent one. McCarthy lays bare the grim realities of the wild west, which has so often been ignored in popular culture in favour of tales of feel-good tales of virtuous cowboys triumphing over evil savages; in McCarthy’s wild west, no one is innocent, and each man is as brutal as the next regardless of their race. Not only do the Glanton Gang scalp those they view as inferior, as well as torture, rape, and pillage those unlucky enough to cross their path, but Native American tribes skewer their enemies with spears and pierce their flesh with arrows, whilst Mexican bandits “pummel one another like apes.” It is not only the characters that are violent, but also the landscape itself, which offers an array of hostile terrains where the dead bodies of babies hang from trees like a sickening mobile and where “lakebed[s] of lava [is] all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood.”
Despite all of its violence, or perhaps because of it, ‘Blood Meridian’ is a truly masterful piece of storytelling. I savoured this novel and was engrossed with each page. This is my first McCarthy and will surely not be my last.
This novel is an incredibly violent one. McCarthy lays bare the grim realities of the wild west, which has so often been ignored in popular culture in favour of tales of feel-good tales of virtuous cowboys triumphing over evil savages; in McCarthy’s wild west, no one is innocent, and each man is as brutal as the next regardless of their race. Not only do the Glanton Gang scalp those they view as inferior, as well as torture, rape, and pillage those unlucky enough to cross their path, but Native American tribes skewer their enemies with spears and pierce their flesh with arrows, whilst Mexican bandits “pummel one another like apes.” It is not only the characters that are violent, but also the landscape itself, which offers an array of hostile terrains where the dead bodies of babies hang from trees like a sickening mobile and where “lakebed[s] of lava [is] all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood.”
Despite all of its violence, or perhaps because of it, ‘Blood Meridian’ is a truly masterful piece of storytelling. I savoured this novel and was engrossed with each page. This is my first McCarthy and will surely not be my last.