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The Road
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 Customer Reviews
Harrowing. try not to cry at the end like i did., 19 Nov 2008
The Dialouge: spare rhythmical exchange between father and son in a post apocolyptic hell world. ( I believed every word they said to each other, Realism!!! so amazing)
The Writing: some good similies. the Father's thoughts are beautiful and realistic.
The Story: The Father and son are 100 percent beleivable. it felt real. it all felt real. The story has been done before in comic books to death--nice to see it done in a realistic manner.
you, your children, your grandparents should read this., 17 Nov 2008
This is a chilling look ahead. A brilliant writer. Read this with somebody else in the house and phone access to a therapist. This man is my favourite modern American author.
Less would have been More, 16 Nov 2008
I am truly surprised by all the positive reviews. I can't agree. The author has done much better in his previous work (The Plains Trilogy). It is extremely repetitive and endless. It could have been a short story, which would have been more effective.
Carry the fire, 13 Nov 2008
I was initially surprised to hear that `The Road`, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and his son's quest for survival in an America that has befallen some unspecified environmental or nuclear catastrophe. All animal life has disappeared, including most human life, and ash covers everything. Food is scarce, and the survivors have resorted to murder, theft and in some cases slavery and cannibalism. The man and his boy travel the eponymous `Road' to the coast, a quest without any clear objective bar the possibility of encountering other `good guys', and avoiding the `bad guys' as much as possible. Distinguishing whom is whom, however, is not easy, and the tension created by this is brilliantly rendered. Furthermore, and perhaps even more evocatively, is the way McCarthy depicts the protagonists' struggle against the elements in an unyieldingly huge and savage landscape. Their need to huddle together to sustain warmth in the winter nights is as palpable as their paranoia about getting caught by the `bad guys'.
The Road is ultimately a novel about the depth of a father's love for his son (the novel is dedicated to John Francis McCarthy) and his will to protect him at any cost. Thus, McCarthy reserves some faith in the endurance of the human spirit - referred to on several occasions directly as a "fire" that the protagonist's endeavour to keep burning - despite framing man as culpable for his own catastrophe. It's also a hymn to nature's brutal permanence - there is no suggestion that the world itself is poised to end, just that humanity is on the brink. Not exactly `28 Days Later' then, with much of the threat (flesh-eating paedophiles etc.) more suggestive than explicit, and all the more frightening for it.
Survival - or "issues of life and death", as the author put it in one interview - is a theme in many of McCarthy's books, from the `Border Trilogy` to `No Country for Old Men'. His characters often undergo transformative and transgressive experiences on the margins of civilisation, often pitted against the wilds or manifestations of evil ("the bad guys" again) that seem more spectral, or at least representative, than necessarily `real'. Like his frontier-centred novels, The Road is in deep awe of the American wilderness - it's desolate beauty, it's emptiness. Has a more desolate novel ever been written? I haven't read one. Carry the fire.
Yes I am. I am the one., 06 Nov 2008
Most of what needs to be said to prospective readers of this book has probably been said by the reviewers below. But the most affecting aspect for me was definitely the relationship between The Boy and The Man.
For The Man, all that he does is focussed on saving The Boy. Both in a physical sense and in a fighting to maintain a spark of the old world's human decency within his son - to keep him "carrying the fire". But in reality, the fire is burning bright in The Boy in a world where elsewhere it has mostly been firmly extinguished. And in the end, it becomes clear that The Man needed The Boy to save him, and what goodness was left in him, far more.
The best book I've read in a long time.
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No Country for Old Men
Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
*Best price found from Amazon Marketplace seller
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*Amazon: £1.50
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Customer Reviews
Harrowing. try not to cry at the end like i did., 19 Nov 2008
The Dialouge: spare rhythmical exchange between father and son in a post apocolyptic hell world. ( I believed every word they said to each other, Realism!!! so amazing)
The Writing: some good similies. the Father's thoughts are beautiful and realistic.
The Story: The Father and son are 100 percent beleivable. it felt real. it all felt real. The story has been done before in comic books to death--nice to see it done in a realistic manner.
you, your children, your grandparents should read this., 17 Nov 2008
This is a chilling look ahead. A brilliant writer. Read this with somebody else in the house and phone access to a therapist. This man is my favourite modern American author.
Less would have been More, 16 Nov 2008
I am truly surprised by all the positive reviews. I can't agree. The author has done much better in his previous work (The Plains Trilogy). It is extremely repetitive and endless. It could have been a short story, which would have been more effective.
Carry the fire, 13 Nov 2008
I was initially surprised to hear that `The Road`, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and his son's quest for survival in an America that has befallen some unspecified environmental or nuclear catastrophe. All animal life has disappeared, including most human life, and ash covers everything. Food is scarce, and the survivors have resorted to murder, theft and in some cases slavery and cannibalism. The man and his boy travel the eponymous `Road' to the coast, a quest without any clear objective bar the possibility of encountering other `good guys', and avoiding the `bad guys' as much as possible. Distinguishing whom is whom, however, is not easy, and the tension created by this is brilliantly rendered. Furthermore, and perhaps even more evocatively, is the way McCarthy depicts the protagonists' struggle against the elements in an unyieldingly huge and savage landscape. Their need to huddle together to sustain warmth in the winter nights is as palpable as their paranoia about getting caught by the `bad guys'.
The Road is ultimately a novel about the depth of a father's love for his son (the novel is dedicated to John Francis McCarthy) and his will to protect him at any cost. Thus, McCarthy reserves some faith in the endurance of the human spirit - referred to on several occasions directly as a "fire" that the protagonist's endeavour to keep burning - despite framing man as culpable for his own catastrophe. It's also a hymn to nature's brutal permanence - there is no suggestion that the world itself is poised to end, just that humanity is on the brink. Not exactly `28 Days Later' then, with much of the threat (flesh-eating paedophiles etc.) more suggestive than explicit, and all the more frightening for it.
Survival - or "issues of life and death", as the author put it in one interview - is a theme in many of McCarthy's books, from the `Border Trilogy` to `No Country for Old Men'. His characters often undergo transformative and transgressive experiences on the margins of civilisation, often pitted against the wilds or manifestations of evil ("the bad guys" again) that seem more spectral, or at least representative, than necessarily `real'. Like his frontier-centred novels, The Road is in deep awe of the American wilderness - it's desolate beauty, it's emptiness. Has a more desolate novel ever been written? I haven't read one. Carry the fire.
Yes I am. I am the one., 06 Nov 2008
Most of what needs to be said to prospective readers of this book has probably been said by the reviewers below. But the most affecting aspect for me was definitely the relationship between The Boy and The Man.
For The Man, all that he does is focussed on saving The Boy. Both in a physical sense and in a fighting to maintain a spark of the old world's human decency within his son - to keep him "carrying the fire". But in reality, the fire is burning bright in The Boy in a world where elsewhere it has mostly been firmly extinguished. And in the end, it becomes clear that The Man needed The Boy to save him, and what goodness was left in him, far more.
The best book I've read in a long time.
My book of the year., 19 Nov 2008
I loved this book. I enjoyed it so much that I didn`t see the movie. This is America`s top modern author, no question. He just gets better.He understands the human condition when set against a bleak or rugged backcloth, he writes so well.
Worst book ever, 06 Nov 2008
What starts out a promising & exciting story, completely falls apart in the final few chapters. I was so disappointed with this that I threw it in the bin when I finished it (and I have been collecting books all my life). Avoid
Very confusing, 23 Oct 2008
I'm sure this is an exciting novel if you can cope with the style, but I found it very confusing. McCarthy shares a characterstic with Gerald Seymour in that he will write several paragraphs or even pages without saying whom he is writing about (ie he uses personal pronouns rather than names). For me, Seymour gets away with it - just - but in this book it simply serves to complicate a plot which is quite complicated enough. I found this disappointing, because I think that otherwise I might well have enjoyed the novel. As it was, it left me confused, and unsure as to exactly what happened at the end.
Awesome, 07 Oct 2008
It has been years since I read a Cormac McCarthy and I had forgotten just what a fantastic writer he is, one of the best living American writers for sure and deserved of all the praise heaped on him.
A slimmer book than many of his others, and difficult to read without having the film in mind (which is quite faithful to this), but there are one or two scenes that are crucial to the themes of the novel that you wonder why they never made it into the movie.
The narrative voices are superb. And the economy of the language that you just wish that British writers could master, but you realise this is something that seems to run through good American writers' veins and cannot be acquired.
He is the nearest writer I have seen to a modern-day Faulkner.
A true master and I think it is time I re-read some of his earlier novels.
A great read, 30 Jul 2008
Don't know how anyone can give this less than 5. I enjoyed this almost as much as the film (which I believe the Coens chopped and changed to perfection). Cormac McCarthy is one of my favourite authors and this is a brilliant read. The ending is a matter of taste but I believe it is fresh and original and serves the story perfectly. Just adding my two cents to try and up the average star rating.
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Customer Reviews
Harrowing. try not to cry at the end like i did., 19 Nov 2008
The Dialouge: spare rhythmical exchange between father and son in a post apocolyptic hell world. ( I believed every word they said to each other, Realism!!! so amazing)
The Writing: some good similies. the Father's thoughts are beautiful and realistic.
The Story: The Father and son are 100 percent beleivable. it felt real. it all felt real. The story has been done before in comic books to death--nice to see it done in a realistic manner.
you, your children, your grandparents should read this., 17 Nov 2008
This is a chilling look ahead. A brilliant writer. Read this with somebody else in the house and phone access to a therapist. This man is my favourite modern American author.
Less would have been More, 16 Nov 2008
I am truly surprised by all the positive reviews. I can't agree. The author has done much better in his previous work (The Plains Trilogy). It is extremely repetitive and endless. It could have been a short story, which would have been more effective.
Carry the fire, 13 Nov 2008
I was initially surprised to hear that `The Road`, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and his son's quest for survival in an America that has befallen some unspecified environmental or nuclear catastrophe. All animal life has disappeared, including most human life, and ash covers everything. Food is scarce, and the survivors have resorted to murder, theft and in some cases slavery and cannibalism. The man and his boy travel the eponymous `Road' to the coast, a quest without any clear objective bar the possibility of encountering other `good guys', and avoiding the `bad guys' as much as possible. Distinguishing whom is whom, however, is not easy, and the tension created by this is brilliantly rendered. Furthermore, and perhaps even more evocatively, is the way McCarthy depicts the protagonists' struggle against the elements in an unyieldingly huge and savage landscape. Their need to huddle together to sustain warmth in the winter nights is as palpable as their paranoia about getting caught by the `bad guys'.
The Road is ultimately a novel about the depth of a father's love for his son (the novel is dedicated to John Francis McCarthy) and his will to protect him at any cost. Thus, McCarthy reserves some faith in the endurance of the human spirit - referred to on several occasions directly as a "fire" that the protagonist's endeavour to keep burning - despite framing man as culpable for his own catastrophe. It's also a hymn to nature's brutal permanence - there is no suggestion that the world itself is poised to end, just that humanity is on the brink. Not exactly `28 Days Later' then, with much of the threat (flesh-eating paedophiles etc.) more suggestive than explicit, and all the more frightening for it.
Survival - or "issues of life and death", as the author put it in one interview - is a theme in many of McCarthy's books, from the `Border Trilogy` to `No Country for Old Men'. His characters often undergo transformative and transgressive experiences on the margins of civilisation, often pitted against the wilds or manifestations of evil ("the bad guys" again) that seem more spectral, or at least representative, than necessarily `real'. Like his frontier-centred novels, The Road is in deep awe of the American wilderness - it's desolate beauty, it's emptiness. Has a more desolate novel ever been written? I haven't read one. Carry the fire.
Yes I am. I am the one., 06 Nov 2008
Most of what needs to be said to prospective readers of this book has probably been said by the reviewers below. But the most affecting aspect for me was definitely the relationship between The Boy and The Man.
For The Man, all that he does is focussed on saving The Boy. Both in a physical sense and in a fighting to maintain a spark of the old world's human decency within his son - to keep him "carrying the fire". But in reality, the fire is burning bright in The Boy in a world where elsewhere it has mostly been firmly extinguished. And in the end, it becomes clear that The Man needed The Boy to save him, and what goodness was left in him, far more.
The best book I've read in a long time.
My book of the year., 19 Nov 2008
I loved this book. I enjoyed it so much that I didn`t see the movie. This is America`s top modern author, no question. He just gets better.He understands the human condition when set against a bleak or rugged backcloth, he writes so well.
Worst book ever, 06 Nov 2008
What starts out a promising & exciting story, completely falls apart in the final few chapters. I was so disappointed with this that I threw it in the bin when I finished it (and I have been collecting books all my life). Avoid
Very confusing, 23 Oct 2008
I'm sure this is an exciting novel if you can cope with the style, but I found it very confusing. McCarthy shares a characterstic with Gerald Seymour in that he will write several paragraphs or even pages without saying whom he is writing about (ie he uses personal pronouns rather than names). For me, Seymour gets away with it - just - but in this book it simply serves to complicate a plot which is quite complicated enough. I found this disappointing, because I think that otherwise I might well have enjoyed the novel. As it was, it left me confused, and unsure as to exactly what happened at the end.
Awesome, 07 Oct 2008
It has been years since I read a Cormac McCarthy and I had forgotten just what a fantastic writer he is, one of the best living American writers for sure and deserved of all the praise heaped on him.
A slimmer book than many of his others, and difficult to read without having the film in mind (which is quite faithful to this), but there are one or two scenes that are crucial to the themes of the novel that you wonder why they never made it into the movie.
The narrative voices are superb. And the economy of the language that you just wish that British writers could master, but you realise this is something that seems to run through good American writers' veins and cannot be acquired.
He is the nearest writer I have seen to a modern-day Faulkner.
A true master and I think it is time I re-read some of his earlier novels.
A great read, 30 Jul 2008
Don't know how anyone can give this less than 5. I enjoyed this almost as much as the film (which I believe the Coens chopped and changed to perfection). Cormac McCarthy is one of my favourite authors and this is a brilliant read. The ending is a matter of taste but I believe it is fresh and original and serves the story perfectly. Just adding my two cents to try and up the average star rating.
A journey to the dark side, 28 Sep 2008
A long time ago a very astute reviewer said of Herman Melvilles great novel Moby Dick,"A polar wind blows through it and and birds of prey hover over it". A very fitting description of Cormac McCarthys "Blood Meridian" which it resembles.Both the Judge and Ahab are the Devil personified. Both lead their men to destruction over time and vast forbidding terrains. Ahab over the savage seas and The Judge over the stark lunar landscapes of the West. The characters in both books head towards inexorable destruction.
The book is a Western set in that time and place. But it does not slot easily into that genre. I can think of no Western that I can compare it with. Alan LeMays character Amos Edwards in "The Searchers" is a similarly dark character but he is not the devil himself. Aside from Moby Dick I can only compare it with certain Old Testament passages or perhaps an eighteenth century Gothic horror story. The setting I feel is irrelevant. I note one reviewer has read this novel five times such was its power. It has a terrifying beauty that has the strange ability to transfix you like the Gorgons head. You know you are looking at dark forces but are unable to avert your eyes. You are appalled yet compelled. I can understand the compulsion to go back to this book again and again. Could I ? I dont believe so. The novel is just too deep a look into mans heart of darkness. But read it once you must. The power of McCarthys writing takes the breath away. It possesses a strange biblical cadence. Yes it is also visceral, have no illusions, but for all that it is some of the most potent stuff I have read. He has his own unique style which the truly great painters and film makers possessed and he is stamped with the same hallmarks of greatness. Dare I say I believe his writing is as visionary as any of the last centuries writers. A bold claim I know. I can think of no author who can describe landscape better. Contemporary or otherwise. Only time will testify to the truth of this statement. McCarthy can make an unpromising plot mesmerising. Read "The Crossing" to evidence this.
Blood Meridian is set in the 1840s American/Mexican West. It covers the activities of a gang of scalphunters who leave rivers of blood in their wake. It was a period when this area was being laid waste in a scorched earth policy carried out by the Apache Indians. Mexico just South of the border was particularly hard hit. The Apache had warred with the Mexicans for centuries. The hatred ran deep between the two and atrocities were an everyday occurrence. The perfect setting for the nightmare vision that is Blood Meridian.
One can read many things into this book. Many of which may be correct. You must read it yourself and interpret it in your own way. Reading can be a very personal journey. For myself I just saw a rapid and spiralling descent into the dark recesses of the human soul. Aside from the Judge the other characters are not worth mentioning other than to say that they have not a single redeeming feature amongst them. They are a glimpse into those dark places where mans worst vices lurk. No depravity is beneath them. But there is a price to be paid come the final reckoning. They will be judged. The Devil himself lies in wait. He does not age and he laughs at the folly of men. He sees that man never learns from past mistakes. They keep him in business. This keeps him happy so that he can play his fiddle and dance to the end of time.
Far from his best, 15 Sep 2008
While there's always merit in McCarthy's prose, this book suffers badly from a lack of a plot. It's not much more than a collection of well written and interesting massacres.
Bloody and a Little Tedious, 12 Jul 2008
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian traces the kid, that is all we know him as, on an abominable adventure. The story traverse the wild west of the Texas and Mexico border landscape. It depicts the debauchery of a gang of rebels led by someone known as the judge and a character called Glanton. This gang ride on and on committing pointless pillage and murder. The reader is drawn into a beautiful rugged terrain where there is little or no sense of society and certainly no moral compass.
Blood Meridian does not depend on story telling in a conventional sense. Rather the novel's structure and execution is reminiscence of a fly on the wall documentary. The narrator holds the camera and points it at a series of events that is observed. This approach is clearly hightlied by the fact that each chapter summarises events in a pithy manner. Further, as the story progresses paragraph after paragraph begins in this manner: "They rode on, They paused without the cantina, They had lost four men" and so on in a deadpan manner. This approach has the effect of wearing down the reader.
For me the above presents a major flaw with the novel. McCarthy simply report events. Indeed, the novel is said to be based on true events that took place in the nineteenth century. There was no moral dilema for the band of rogues, there was no psychological conflict for any of the characters nor was there any conflict between the individual and his social milieu. As I read, I kept repeating to myself tell me something I don't already know or could researh in the relevant history. In other words, the novel is meant to reveal something new in the story it tells. Arguably, that is one of things that distinguishes it from mere story telling.
Nonetheless, it cannot be said of McCarthy's characters that they operate outside a social context. The politico/social world in which the chracters operate is a Hobbesian one, where the: "Life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." We know this because the narrator tells us that: "Here beyond men's judgment all covenants were brittle." In this new world men (for it is men who rape and plunder) are asserting themselves and the weak becomes vanquished. Ironically, if McCarthy purports Christian values then even God is unable to help. In one passage the kid enters a church to discover: "There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who'd barricaded themselves in this house of God against the heathen."
The impact of reading Blood Meridian is that one is left feeling battered by its relentless visciousness and barbarity. The diction of the prose is one of repetitive cruelty. In one pragraph the kid and his prisoner companions saw: "blackeyed young girls ..., a pack of vicious looking human ..., riders wearing scapulars or neckless of dried and blackened human ears." The prose also conjures up a sense of black-darkness. Many of McCarty's adjectives are compound words made up of black, for example blackeye, blackened and blackhaired. Along with the fact that the Indians are labelled: "half naked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh," someone with a politically correct bent would accuse at least McCarty's narrator of racism.
What lifts McCarthy's narrative from its depressing bleakness is at times his marvellous descriptive writing. Here is an example that comes alive in onomatopoeia fashion: "The first cries of birds in the trees along the river and the clink of harness and the snuffle of horses and the gentle sound of their cropping." These sounds are set in the predawn dark so even though we cannot visualise the scene we nonetheless get a good image of it by the sounds. This is first rate writing.
However, McCarthy's style is a mixed bag of the impenetrable and the transparent. In places the syntax of McCarthy's sentences is biblical in style. For example, "Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no sould save he." On the other hand, the use of figurative language captures and evokes the desolate landscape very well. For instance, "... where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus."
About a third of the way through this book, I felt that I had the measure of it and as I was not enjoying it I should cease reading it any further. Nonetheless, I ploughed on and discovered some passages of great writing. However, the sum of these great passages does not make up for a whole book that could be called great.
Disappointing: Not as engrossing as other McCarthy Novels, 13 Jun 2008
I have already read several Cormac McCarthy novels and found them all thoroughly entertaining, emotional and thought provoking. I am sorry to say that I found 'Blood Meridian' quite disappointing; in fact, I stopped reading it just over 3/4 of the way in as I was getting bored with it and just couldn't be bothered to finish it. Despite it clearly being a work of McCarthy, with his fantastic descriptive techniques and conversational style of writing, the story just did not hold my attention or provoke my interest in the same way his other works did.
The plot covers an ever-changing selection of male characters, with a few that are prominent and have an enduring-presence, who are involved in the 'Indian' wars of the 1840s in West Texas and Mexico. They are essentially mercenaries, except that there is very little discrimination as to who, or what, is killed nor whether a reward will actually be forthcoming for their 'work'.
There is an extreme level of violence, a lot of it is senseless and unprovoked and it goes largely unexplained or justified. Whilst I was not put-off by that violence (or lack of reasoning for it), it was essentially this and other repetitive occurrences which dominate the plot, with nothing else of enough note happening to maintain my attention. I believe the main premise of the novel is to highlight that indiscriminate and brutal violence, but I don't think that was good enough reason to justify it being fictionalised with no other significant elements to the tale.
For me, the magic of McCarthy's writing is that despite there rarely being an all-encompassing plot, an interest is maintained by a combination of being interested in his fascinating characters and/or the wry humour associated with their story.
Blood Meridian has one interesting character (The Judge), but he does appear until some way into the novel nor feature prominently enough from then on (despite him clearly evolving into the central character); crucially, I did not feel any connection or real interest in the fate of any of the characters.
Yes, as I have already alluded to, the identifiable methods and style McCarthy uses to describe the action are present and occasionally breathtaking. But halfway through the novel, whilst I was still engrossed, I realised the monotony of what was happening and slowly (and reluctantly) realised that this was not classic McCarthy; I think there is good work inside this novel, but it needs to be about half the length.
If I compare this book to my favourite McCarthy work, 'Suttree' (see my Amazon review), there is no contest. When I note that Blood Meridian was published in 1985 and Suttree in 1989, I can only presume that McCarthy matured as a writer at some point between those dates.
By all means, give Blood Meridian a try to experience a unique and noteworthy writing-style describing dramatic violence and traumatic life, but don't expect the story to develop much from what is outlined within the first few pages.....
My recommendation is to read Suttree instead !
Not for me thanks, 30 May 2008
Ok so there is great prose and a dark story line but it is so extreme what is the point? I struggled to get into this book and could not make any connections with the characters; it was difficult to understand why they were doing what they were doing and where they were going. The coincidences were also beyond credible. I would give it a bye and read "No country" or "the road"
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The Border Trilogy
Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
*Best price found from Amazon Marketplace seller
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*Amazon: £4.45
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Customer Reviews
Harrowing. try not to cry at the end like i did., 19 Nov 2008
The Dialouge: spare rhythmical exchange between father and son in a post apocolyptic hell world. ( I believed every word they said to each other, Realism!!! so amazing)
The Writing: some good similies. the Father's thoughts are beautiful and realistic.
The Story: The Father and son are 100 percent beleivable. it felt real. it all felt real. The story has been done before in comic books to death--nice to see it done in a realistic manner.
you, your children, your grandparents should read this., 17 Nov 2008
This is a chilling look ahead. A brilliant writer. Read this with somebody else in the house and phone access to a therapist. This man is my favourite modern American author.
Less would have been More, 16 Nov 2008
I am truly surprised by all the positive reviews. I can't agree. The author has done much better in his previous work (The Plains Trilogy). It is extremely repetitive and endless. It could have been a short story, which would have been more effective.
Carry the fire, 13 Nov 2008
I was initially surprised to hear that `The Road`, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and his son's quest for survival in an America that has befallen some unspecified environmental or nuclear catastrophe. All animal life has disappeared, including most human life, and ash covers everything. Food is scarce, and the survivors have resorted to murder, theft and in some cases slavery and cannibalism. The man and his boy travel the eponymous `Road' to the coast, a quest without any clear objective bar the possibility of encountering other `good guys', and avoiding the `bad guys' as much as possible. Distinguishing whom is whom, however, is not easy, and the tension created by this is brilliantly rendered. Furthermore, and perhaps even more evocatively, is the way McCarthy depicts the protagonists' struggle against the elements in an unyieldingly huge and savage landscape. Their need to huddle together to sustain warmth in the winter nights is as palpable as their paranoia about getting caught by the `bad guys'.
The Road is ultimately a novel about the depth of a father's love for his son (the novel is dedicated to John Francis McCarthy) and his will to protect him at any cost. Thus, McCarthy reserves some faith in the endurance of the human spirit - referred to on several occasions directly as a "fire" that the protagonist's endeavour to keep burning - despite framing man as culpable for his own catastrophe. It's also a hymn to nature's brutal permanence - there is no suggestion that the world itself is poised to end, just that humanity is on the brink. Not exactly `28 Days Later' then, with much of the threat (flesh-eating paedophiles etc.) more suggestive than explicit, and all the more frightening for it.
Survival - or "issues of life and death", as the author put it in one interview - is a theme in many of McCarthy's books, from the `Border Trilogy` to `No Country for Old Men'. His characters often undergo transformative and transgressive experiences on the margins of civilisation, often pitted against the wilds or manifestations of evil ("the bad guys" again) that seem more spectral, or at least representative, than necessarily `real'. Like his frontier-centred novels, The Road is in deep awe of the American wilderness - it's desolate beauty, it's emptiness. Has a more desolate novel ever been written? I haven't read one. Carry the fire.
Yes I am. I am the one., 06 Nov 2008
Most of what needs to be said to prospective readers of this book has probably been said by the reviewers below. But the most affecting aspect for me was definitely the relationship between The Boy and The Man.
For The Man, all that he does is focussed on saving The Boy. Both in a physical sense and in a fighting to maintain a spark of the old world's human decency within his son - to keep him "carrying the fire". But in reality, the fire is burning bright in The Boy in a world where elsewhere it has mostly been firmly extinguished. And in the end, it becomes clear that The Man needed The Boy to save him, and what goodness was left in him, far more.
The best book I've read in a long time.
My book of the year., 19 Nov 2008
I loved this book. I enjoyed it so much that I didn`t see the movie. This is America`s top modern author, no question. He just gets better.He understands the human condition when set against a bleak or rugged backcloth, he writes so well.
Worst book ever, 06 Nov 2008
What starts out a promising & exciting story, completely falls apart in the final few chapters. I was so disappointed with this that I threw it in the bin when I finished it (and I have been collecting books all my life). Avoid
Very confusing, 23 Oct 2008
I'm sure this is an exciting novel if you can cope with the style, but I found it very confusing. McCarthy shares a characterstic with Gerald Seymour in that he will write several paragraphs or even pages without saying whom he is writing about (ie he uses personal pronouns rather than names). For me, Seymour gets away with it - just - but in this book it simply serves to complicate a plot which is quite complicated enough. I found this disappointing, because I think that otherwise I might well have enjoyed the novel. As it was, it left me confused, and unsure as to exactly what happened at the end.
Awesome, 07 Oct 2008
It has been years since I read a Cormac McCarthy and I had forgotten just what a fantastic writer he is, one of the best living American writers for sure and deserved of all the praise heaped on him.
A slimmer book than many of his others, and difficult to read without having the film in mind (which is quite faithful to this), but there are one or two scenes that are crucial to the themes of the novel that you wonder why they never made it into the movie.
The narrative voices are superb. And the economy of the language that you just wish that British writers could master, but you realise this is something that seems to run through good American writers' veins and cannot be acquired.
He is the nearest writer I have seen to a modern-day Faulkner.
A true master and I think it is time I re-read some of his earlier novels.
A great read, 30 Jul 2008
Don't know how anyone can give this less than 5. I enjoyed this almost as much as the film (which I believe the Coens chopped and changed to perfection). Cormac McCarthy is one of my favourite authors and this is a brilliant read. The ending is a matter of taste but I believe it is fresh and original and serves the story perfectly. Just adding my two cents to try and up the average star rating.
A journey to the dark side, 28 Sep 2008
A long time ago a very astute reviewer said of Herman Melvilles great novel Moby Dick,"A polar wind blows through it and and birds of prey hover over it". A very fitting description of Cormac McCarthys "Blood Meridian" which it resembles.Both the Judge and Ahab are the Devil personified. Both lead their men to destruction over time and vast forbidding terrains. Ahab over the savage seas and The Judge over the stark lunar landscapes of the West. The characters in both books head towards inexorable destruction.
The book is a Western set in that time and place. But it does not slot easily into that genre. I can think of no Western that I can compare it with. Alan LeMays character Amos Edwards in "The Searchers" is a similarly dark character but he is not the devil himself. Aside from Moby Dick I can only compare it with certain Old Testament passages or perhaps an eighteenth century Gothic horror story. The setting I feel is irrelevant. I note one reviewer has read this novel five times such was its power. It has a terrifying beauty that has the strange ability to transfix you like the Gorgons head. You know you are looking at dark forces but are unable to avert your eyes. You are appalled yet compelled. I can understand the compulsion to go back to this book again and again. Could I ? I dont believe so. The novel is just too deep a look into mans heart of darkness. But read it once you must. The power of McCarthys writing takes the breath away. It possesses a strange biblical cadence. Yes it is also visceral, have no illusions, but for all that it is some of the most potent stuff I have read. He has his own unique style which the truly great painters and film makers possessed and he is stamped with the same hallmarks of greatness. Dare I say I believe his writing is as visionary as any of the last centuries writers. A bold claim I know. I can think of no author who can describe landscape better. Contemporary or otherwise. Only time will testify to the truth of this statement. McCarthy can make an unpromising plot mesmerising. Read "The Crossing" to evidence this.
Blood Meridian is set in the 1840s American/Mexican West. It covers the activities of a gang of scalphunters who leave rivers of blood in their wake. It was a period when this area was being laid waste in a scorched earth policy carried out by the Apache Indians. Mexico just South of the border was particularly hard hit. The Apache had warred with the Mexicans for centuries. The hatred ran deep between the two and atrocities were an everyday occurrence. The perfect setting for the nightmare vision that is Blood Meridian.
One can read many things into this book. Many of which may be correct. You must read it yourself and interpret it in your own way. Reading can be a very personal journey. For myself I just saw a rapid and spiralling descent into the dark recesses of the human soul. Aside from the Judge the other characters are not worth mentioning other than to say that they have not a single redeeming feature amongst them. They are a glimpse into those dark places where mans worst vices lurk. No depravity is beneath them. But there is a price to be paid come the final reckoning. They will be judged. The Devil himself lies in wait. He does not age and he laughs at the folly of men. He sees that man never learns from past mistakes. They keep him in business. This keeps him happy so that he can play his fiddle and dance to the end of time.
Far from his best, 15 Sep 2008
While there's always merit in McCarthy's prose, this book suffers badly from a lack of a plot. It's not much more than a collection of well written and interesting massacres.
Bloody and a Little Tedious, 12 Jul 2008
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian traces the kid, that is all we know him as, on an abominable adventure. The story traverse the wild west of the Texas and Mexico border landscape. It depicts the debauchery of a gang of rebels led by someone known as the judge and a character called Glanton. This gang ride on and on committing pointless pillage and murder. The reader is drawn into a beautiful rugged terrain where there is little or no sense of society and certainly no moral compass.
Blood Meridian does not depend on story telling in a conventional sense. Rather the novel's structure and execution is reminiscence of a fly on the wall documentary. The narrator holds the camera and points it at a series of events that is observed. This approach is clearly hightlied by the fact that each chapter summarises events in a pithy manner. Further, as the story progresses paragraph after paragraph begins in this manner: "They rode on, They paused without the cantina, They had lost four men" and so on in a deadpan manner. This approach has the effect of wearing down the reader.
For me the above presents a major flaw with the novel. McCarthy simply report events. Indeed, the novel is said to be based on true events that took place in the nineteenth century. There was no moral dilema for the band of rogues, there was no psychological conflict for any of the characters nor was there any conflict between the individual and his social milieu. As I read, I kept repeating to myself tell me something I don't already know or could researh in the relevant history. In other words, the novel is meant to reveal something new in the story it tells. Arguably, that is one of things that distinguishes it from mere story telling.
Nonetheless, it cannot be said of McCarthy's characters that they operate outside a social context. The politico/social world in which the chracters operate is a Hobbesian one, where the: "Life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." We know this because the narrator tells us that: "Here beyond men's judgment all covenants were brittle." In this new world men (for it is men who rape and plunder) are asserting themselves and the weak becomes vanquished. Ironically, if McCarthy purports Christian values then even God is unable to help. In one passage the kid enters a church to discover: "There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who'd barricaded themselves in this house of God against the heathen."
The impact of reading Blood Meridian is that one is left feeling battered by its relentless visciousness and barbarity. The diction of the prose is one of repetitive cruelty. In one pragraph the kid and his prisoner companions saw: "blackeyed young girls ..., a pack of vicious looking human ..., riders wearing scapulars or neckless of dried and blackened human ears." The prose also conjures up a sense of black-darkness. Many of McCarty's adjectives are compound words made up of black, for example blackeye, blackened and blackhaired. Along with the fact that the Indians are labelled: "half naked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh," someone with a politically correct bent would accuse at least McCarty's narrator of racism.
What lifts McCarthy's narrative from its depressing bleakness is at times his marvellous descriptive writing. Here is an example that comes alive in onomatopoeia fashion: "The first cries of birds in the trees along the river and the clink of harness and the snuffle of horses and the gentle sound of their cropping." These sounds are set in the predawn dark so even though we cannot visualise the scene we nonetheless get a good image of it by the sounds. This is first rate writing.
However, McCarthy's style is a mixed bag of the impenetrable and the transparent. In places the syntax of McCarthy's sentences is biblical in style. For example, "Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no sould save he." On the other hand, the use of figurative language captures and evokes the desolate landscape very well. For instance, "... where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus."
About a third of the way through this book, I felt that I had the measure of it and as I was not enjoying it I should cease reading it any further. Nonetheless, I ploughed on and discovered some passages of great writing. However, the sum of these great passages does not make up for a whole book that could be called great.
Disappointing: Not as engrossing as other McCarthy Novels, 13 Jun 2008
I have already read several Cormac McCarthy novels and found them all thoroughly entertaining, emotional and thought provoking. I am sorry to say that I found 'Blood Meridian' quite disappointing; in fact, I stopped reading it just over 3/4 of the way in as I was getting bored with it and just couldn't be bothered to finish it. Despite it clearly being a work of McCarthy, with his fantastic descriptive techniques and conversational style of writing, the story just did not hold my attention or provoke my interest in the same way his other works did.
The plot covers an ever-changing selection of male characters, with a few that are prominent and have an enduring-presence, who are involved in the 'Indian' wars of the 1840s in West Texas and Mexico. They are essentially mercenaries, except that there is very little discrimination as to who, or what, is killed nor whether a reward will actually be forthcoming for their 'work'.
There is an extreme level of violence, a lot of it is senseless and unprovoked and it goes largely unexplained or justified. Whilst I was not put-off by that violence (or lack of reasoning for it), it was essentially this and other repetitive occurrences which dominate the plot, with nothing else of enough note happening to maintain my attention. I believe the main premise of the novel is to highlight that indiscriminate and brutal violence, but I don't think that was good enough reason to justify it being fictionalised with no other significant elements to the tale.
For me, the magic of McCarthy's writing is that despite there rarely being an all-encompassing plot, an interest is maintained by a combination of being interested in his fascinating characters and/or the wry humour associated with their story.
Blood Meridian has one interesting character (The Judge), but he does appear until some way into the novel nor feature prominently enough from then on (despite him clearly evolving into the central character); crucially, I did not feel any connection or real interest in the fate of any of the characters.
Yes, as I have already alluded to, the identifiable methods and style McCarthy uses to describe the action are present and occasionally breathtaking. But halfway through the novel, whilst I was still engrossed, I realised the monotony of what was happening and slowly (and reluctantly) realised that this was not classic McCarthy; I think there is good work inside this novel, but it needs to be about half the length.
If I compare this book to my favourite McCarthy work, 'Suttree' (see my Amazon review), there is no contest. When I note that Blood Meridian was published in 1985 and Suttree in 1989, I can only presume that McCarthy matured as a writer at some point between those dates.
By all means, give Blood Meridian a try to experience a unique and noteworthy writing-style describing dramatic violence and traumatic life, but don't expect the story to develop much from what is outlined within the first few pages.....
My recommendation is to read Suttree instead !
Not for me thanks, 30 May 2008
Ok so there is great prose and a dark story line but it is so extreme what is the point? I struggled to get into this book and could not make any connections with the characters; it was difficult to understand why they were doing what they were doing and where they were going. The coincidences were also beyond credible. I would give it a bye and read "No country" or "the road"
Great literature, 29 Oct 2008
People who say the novel is dead, or that no one writes great literature anymore should read Cormac McCarthy, and the Border Trilogy in particular. Having read all of his books, these are clearly his best for the writing, themes and storytelling. Like all great literature, the context is involving, and the subtext thrilling. I would single out The Crossing (the middle book) as one of the best books I have ever read. Instead of giving the Nobel Prize for Literature to obscure Romanian poets, why not a thought for the elderly McCarthy?
Just plain wonderful, 10 May 2007
As others have said the lack of punctuation is odd to begin with but does make sense.
The stories just flow and you find yourself "held" as with all good books.
However, the stories capture the bleakness of the life. You will not find Hollywood in these pages. The characters are real, often frightening, even if they are doing apparently little. The potential for violence is there, though these books are far from blood lettings.
I know that a film was attempted of one of these books, with Matt Damon but never gained much box office success. A bit like Lord of the Rings in that various attempts were made before the Peter Jackson Trilogy. I suspect that for the right director these stories will become a fantastic film but at the moment the books themselves are astounding.
The Border Trilogy, 11 Feb 2007
Cormac McCarthy is a unique voice in American fiction. His flowing polysyndetic prose forms a poetic vision of the American West that is almost Biblical in its rythmns. The Border Trilogy is a fable about a last generation of cowboys - John Grady Cole and Billy Parnham - drawn into Mexico on dark odysseys that belie the bloodthirsty beginnings of their own country. It is a voyage that goes way beyond a revision of the Western genre and the re-evaluation of its good vs evil paradym, but into the heart of myth and legend itself - in particular that rooted at the heart of the American experience. Its use of parable, its sense of impending apocalypse and its strangely histrionic dialogue amount to a kind of imagined Biblical testament to the evolution of American culture. A landmark work of literature that left this reader feeling forever changed.
one of my best books ,ever!, 30 Jan 2001
all the pretty horses is incredibly irritating at the beginning- a lack of all punctuation -but you very quickly get used to this, and subsequently all the other books you read seem overloaded with it.this book has the very best fight description (though the prison scene in tom wolfe's 'a man in full' runs a very close second), of any book i've read. this is an incredible, exhilarating read; people who object to the spanish bits they don't get.....well, that's probably the point-the book is not meant to be obvious.
A handsome edition of a major American work, 22 Nov 2000
This handsome edition of McCarthy's completed Border Trilogy in one volume gives the reader one of the most important works of American fiction of the last decades. McCarthy's work is far more than a western, but crosses the borders between fiction and philosophy, the real and the world of dream. With influences ranging from the traditional western; the coming-of-age story; the courtly romance; classical tragedy; and magical realism, McCarthy's masterpiece is a work to be read and read again. This new volume containing all three of the novels, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain, is a welcome addition to the canon of McCarthy's works in print.
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Customer Reviews
Harrowing. try not to cry at the end like i did., 19 Nov 2008
The Dialouge: spare rhythmical exchange between father and son in a post apocolyptic hell world. ( I believed every word they said to each other, Realism!!! so amazing)
The Writing: some good similies. the Father's thoughts are beautiful and realistic.
The Story: The Father and son are 100 percent beleivable. it felt real. it all felt real. The story has been done before in comic books to death--nice to see it done in a realistic manner.
you, your children, your grandparents should read this., 17 Nov 2008
This is a chilling look ahead. A brilliant writer. Read this with somebody else in the house and phone access to a therapist. This man is my favourite modern American author.
Less would have been More, 16 Nov 2008
I am truly surprised by all the positive reviews. I can't agree. The author has done much better in his previous work (The Plains Trilogy). It is extremely repetitive and endless. It could have been a short story, which would have been more effective.
Carry the fire, 13 Nov 2008
I was initially surprised to hear that `The Road`, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and his son's quest for survival in an America that has befallen some unspecified environmental or nuclear catastrophe. All animal life has disappeared, including most human life, and ash covers everything. Food is scarce, and the survivors have resorted to murder, theft and in some cases slavery and cannibalism. The man and his boy travel the eponymous `Road' to the coast, a quest without any clear objective bar the possibility of encountering other `good guys', and avoiding the `bad guys' as much as possible. Distinguishing whom is whom, however, is not easy, and the tension created by this is brilliantly rendered. Furthermore, and perhaps even more evocatively, is the way McCarthy depicts the protagonists' struggle against the elements in an unyieldingly huge and savage landscape. Their need to huddle together to sustain warmth in the winter nights is as palpable as their paranoia about getting caught by the `bad guys'.
The Road is ultimately a novel about the depth of a father's love for his son (the novel is dedicated to John Francis McCarthy) and his will to protect him at any cost. Thus, McCarthy reserves some faith in the endurance of the human spirit - referred to on several occasions directly as a "fire" that the protagonist's endeavour to keep burning - despite framing man as culpable for his own catastrophe. It's also a hymn to nature's brutal permanence - there is no suggestion that the world itself is poised to end, just that humanity is on the brink. Not exactly `28 Days Later' then, with much of the threat (flesh-eating paedophiles etc.) more suggestive than explicit, and all the more frightening for it.
Survival - or "issues of life and death", as the author put it in one interview - is a theme in many of McCarthy's books, from the `Border Trilogy` to `No Country for Old Men'. His characters often undergo transformative and transgressive experiences on the margins of civilisation, often pitted against the wilds or manifestations of evil ("the bad guys" again) that seem more spectral, or at least representative, than necessarily `real'. Like his frontier-centred novels, The Road is in deep awe of the American wilderness - it's desolate beauty, it's emptiness. Has a more desolate novel ever been written? I haven't read one. Carry the fire.
Yes I am. I am the one., 06 Nov 2008
Most of what needs to be said to prospective readers of this book has probably been said by the reviewers below. But the most affecting aspect for me was definitely the relationship between The Boy and The Man.
For The Man, all that he does is focussed on saving The Boy. Both in a physical sense and in a fighting to maintain a spark of the old world's human decency within his son - to keep him "carrying the fire". But in reality, the fire is burning bright in The Boy in a world where elsewhere it has mostly been firmly extinguished. And in the end, it becomes clear that The Man needed The Boy to save him, and what goodness was left in him, far more.
The best book I've read in a long time.
My book of the year., 19 Nov 2008
I loved this book. I enjoyed it so much that I didn`t see the movie. This is America`s top modern author, no question. He just gets better.He understands the human condition when set against a bleak or rugged backcloth, he writes so well.
Worst book ever, 06 Nov 2008
What starts out a promising & exciting story, completely falls apart in the final few chapters. I was so disappointed with this that I threw it in the bin when I finished it (and I have been collecting books all my life). Avoid
Very confusing, 23 Oct 2008
I'm sure this is an exciting novel if you can cope with the style, but I found it very confusing. McCarthy shares a characterstic with Gerald Seymour in that he will write several paragraphs or even pages without saying whom he is writing about (ie he uses personal pronouns rather than names). For me, Seymour gets away with it - just - but in this book it simply serves to complicate a plot which is quite complicated enough. I found this disappointing, because I think that otherwise I might well have enjoyed the novel. As it was, it left me confused, and unsure as to exactly what happened at the end.
Awesome, 07 Oct 2008
It has been years since I read a Cormac McCarthy and I had forgotten just what a fantastic writer he is, one of the best living American writers for sure and deserved of all the praise heaped on him.
A slimmer book than many of his others, and difficult to read without having the film in mind (which is quite faithful to this), but there are one or two scenes that are crucial to the themes of the novel that you wonder why they never made it into the movie.
The narrative voices are superb. And the economy of the language that you just wish that British writers could master, but you realise this is something that seems to run through good American writers' veins and cannot be acquired.
He is the nearest writer I have seen to a modern-day Faulkner.
A true master and I think it is time I re-read some of his earlier novels.
A great read, 30 Jul 2008
Don't know how anyone can give this less than 5. I enjoyed this almost as much as the film (which I believe the Coens chopped and changed to perfection). Cormac McCarthy is one of my favourite authors and this is a brilliant read. The ending is a matter of taste but I believe it is fresh and original and serves the story perfectly. Just adding my two cents to try and up the average star rating.
A journey to the dark side, 28 Sep 2008
A long time ago a very astute reviewer said of Herman Melvilles great novel Moby Dick,"A polar wind blows through it and and birds of prey hover over it". A very fitting description of Cormac McCarthys "Blood Meridian" which it resembles.Both the Judge and Ahab are the Devil personified. Both lead their men to destruction over time and vast forbidding terrains. Ahab over the savage seas and The Judge over the stark lunar landscapes of the West. The characters in both books head towards inexorable destruction.
The book is a Western set in that time and place. But it does not slot easily into that genre. I can think of no Western that I can compare it with. Alan LeMays character Amos Edwards in "The Searchers" is a similarly dark character but he is not the devil himself. Aside from Moby Dick I can only compare it with certain Old Testament passages or perhaps an eighteenth century Gothic horror story. The setting I feel is irrelevant. I note one reviewer has read this novel five times such was its power. It has a terrifying beauty that has the strange ability to transfix you like the Gorgons head. You know you are looking at dark forces but are unable to avert your eyes. You are appalled yet compelled. I can understand the compulsion to go back to this book again and again. Could I ? I dont believe so. The novel is just too deep a look into mans heart of darkness. But read it once you must. The power of McCarthys writing takes the breath away. It possesses a strange biblical cadence. Yes it is also visceral, have no illusions, but for all that it is some of the most potent stuff I have read. He has his own unique style which the truly great painters and film makers possessed and he is stamped with the same hallmarks of greatness. Dare I say I believe his writing is as visionary as any of the last centuries writers. A bold claim I know. I can think of no author who can describe landscape better. Contemporary or otherwise. Only time will testify to the truth of this statement. McCarthy can make an unpromising plot mesmerising. Read "The Crossing" to evidence this.
Blood Meridian is set in the 1840s American/Mexican West. It covers the activities of a gang of scalphunters who leave rivers of blood in their wake. It was a period when this area was being laid waste in a scorched earth policy carried out by the Apache Indians. Mexico just South of the border was particularly hard hit. The Apache had warred with the Mexicans for centuries. The hatred ran deep between the two and atrocities were an everyday occurrence. The perfect setting for the nightmare vision that is Blood Meridian.
One can read many things into this book. Many of which may be correct. You must read it yourself and interpret it in your own way. Reading can be a very personal journey. For myself I just saw a rapid and spiralling descent into the dark recesses of the human soul. Aside from the Judge the other characters are not worth mentioning other than to say that they have not a single redeeming feature amongst them. They are a glimpse into those dark places where mans worst vices lurk. No depravity is beneath them. But there is a price to be paid come the final reckoning. They will be judged. The Devil himself lies in wait. He does not age and he laughs at the folly of men. He sees that man never learns from past mistakes. They keep him in business. This keeps him happy so that he can play his fiddle and dance to the end of time.
Far from his best, 15 Sep 2008
While there's always merit in McCarthy's prose, this book suffers badly from a lack of a plot. It's not much more than a collection of well written and interesting massacres.
Bloody and a Little Tedious, 12 Jul 2008
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian traces the kid, that is all we know him as, on an abominable adventure. The story traverse the wild west of the Texas and Mexico border landscape. It depicts the debauchery of a gang of rebels led by someone known as the judge and a character called Glanton. This gang ride on and on committing pointless pillage and murder. The reader is drawn into a beautiful rugged terrain where there is little or no sense of society and certainly no moral compass.
Blood Meridian does not depend on story telling in a conventional sense. Rather the novel's structure and execution is reminiscence of a fly on the wall documentary. The narrator holds the camera and points it at a series of events that is observed. This approach is clearly hightlied by the fact that each chapter summarises events in a pithy manner. Further, as the story progresses paragraph after paragraph begins in this manner: "They rode on, They paused without the cantina, They had lost four men" and so on in a deadpan manner. This approach has the effect of wearing down the reader.
For me the above presents a major flaw with the novel. McCarthy simply report events. Indeed, the novel is said to be based on true events that took place in the nineteenth century. There was no moral dilema for the band of rogues, there was no psychological conflict for any of the characters nor was there any conflict between the individual and his social milieu. As I read, I kept repeating to myself tell me something I don't already know or could researh in the relevant history. In other words, the novel is meant to reveal something new in the story it tells. Arguably, that is one of things that distinguishes it from mere story telling.
Nonetheless, it cannot be said of McCarthy's characters that they operate outside a social context. The politico/social world in which the chracters operate is a Hobbesian one, where the: "Life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." We know this because the narrator tells us that: "Here beyond men's judgment all covenants were brittle." In this new world men (for it is men who rape and plunder) are asserting themselves and the weak becomes vanquished. Ironically, if McCarthy purports Christian values then even God is unable to help. In one passage the kid enters a church to discover: "There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who'd barricaded themselves in this house of God against the heathen."
The impact of reading Blood Meridian is that one is left feeling battered by its relentless visciousness and barbarity. The diction of the prose is one of repetitive cruelty. In one pragraph the kid and his prisoner companions saw: "blackeyed young girls ..., a pack of vicious looking human ..., riders wearing scapulars or neckless of dried and blackened human ears." The prose also conjures up a sense of black-darkness. Many of McCarty's adjectives are compound words made up of black, for example blackeye, blackened and blackhaired. Along with the fact that the Indians are labelled: "half naked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh," someone with a politically correct bent would accuse at least McCarty's narrator of racism.
What lifts McCarthy's narrative from its depressing bleakness is at times his marvellous descriptive writing. Here is an example that comes alive in onomatopoeia fashion: "The first cries of birds in the trees along the river and the clink of harness and the snuffle of horses and the gentle sound of their cropping." These sounds are set in the predawn dark so even though we cannot visualise the scene we nonetheless get a good image of it by the sounds. This is first rate writing.
However, McCarthy's style is a mixed bag of the impenetrable and the transparent. In places the syntax of McCarthy's sentences is biblical in style. For example, "Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no sould save he." On the other hand, the use of figurative language captures and evokes the desolate landscape very well. For instance, "... where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus."
About a third of the way through this book, I felt that I had the measure of it and as I was not enjoying it I should cease reading it any further. Nonetheless, I ploughed on and discovered some passages of great writing. However, the sum of these great passages does not make up for a whole book that could be called great.
Disappointing: Not as engrossing as other McCarthy Novels, 13 Jun 2008
I have already read several Cormac McCarthy novels and found them all thoroughly entertaining, emotional and thought provoking. I am sorry to say that I found 'Blood Meridian' quite disappointing; in fact, I stopped reading it just over 3/4 of the way in as I was getting bored with it and just couldn't be bothered to finish it. Despite it clearly being a work of McCarthy, with his fantastic descriptive techniques and conversational style of writing, the story just did not hold my attention or provoke my interest in the same way his other works did.
The plot covers an ever-changing selection of male characters, with a few that are prominent and have an enduring-presence, who are involved in the 'Indian' wars of the 1840s in West Texas and Mexico. They are essentially mercenaries, except that there is very little discrimination as to who, or what, is killed nor whether a reward will actually be forthcoming for their 'work'.
There is an extreme level of violence, a lot of it is senseless and unprovoked and it goes largely unexplained or justified. Whilst I was not put-off by that violence (or lack of reasoning for it), it was essentially this and other repetitive occurrences which dominate the plot, with nothing else of enough note happening to maintain my attention. I believe the main premise of the novel is to highlight that indiscriminate and brutal violence, but I don't think that was good enough reason to justify it being fictionalised with no other significant elements to the tale.
For me, the magic of McCarthy's writing is that despite there rarely being an all-encompassing plot, an interest is maintained by a combination of being interested in his fascinating characters and/or the wry humour associated with their story.
Blood Meridian has one interesting character (The Judge), but he does appear until some way into the novel nor feature prominently enough from then on (despite him clearly evolving into the central character); crucially, I did not feel any connection or real interest in the fate of any of the characters.
Yes, as I have already alluded to, the identifiable methods and style McCarthy uses to describe the action are present and occasionally breathtaking. But halfway through the novel, whilst I was still engrossed, I realised the monotony of what was happening and slowly (and reluctantly) realised that this was not classic McCarthy; I think there is good work inside this novel, but it needs to be about half the length.
If I compare this book to my favourite McCarthy work, 'Suttree' (see my Amazon review), there is no contest. When I note that Blood Meridian was published in 1985 and Suttree in 1989, I can only presume that McCarthy matured as a writer at some point between those dates.
By all means, give Blood Meridian a try to experience a unique and noteworthy writing-style describing dramatic violence and traumatic life, but don't expect the story to develop much from what is outlined within the first few pages.....
My recommendation is to read Suttree instead !
Not for me thanks, 30 May 2008
Ok so there is great prose and a dark story line but it is so extreme what is the point? I struggled to get into this book and could not make any connections with the characters; it was difficult to understand why they were doing what they were doing and where they were going. The coincidences were also beyond credible. I would give it a bye and read "No country" or "the road"
Great literature, 29 Oct 2008
People who say the novel is dead, or that no one writes great literature anymore should read Cormac McCarthy, and the Border Trilogy in particular. Having read all of his books, these are clearly his best for the writing, themes and storytelling. Like all great literature, the context is involving, and the subtext thrilling. I would single out The Crossing (the middle book) as one of the best books I have ever read. Instead of giving the Nobel Prize for Literature to obscure Romanian poets, why not a thought for the elderly McCarthy?
Just plain wonderful, 10 May 2007
As others have said the lack of punctuation is odd to begin with but does make sense.
The stories just flow and you find yourself "held" as with all good books.
However, the stories capture the bleakness of the life. You will not find Hollywood in these pages. The characters are real, often frightening, even if they are doing apparently little. The potential for violence is there, though these books are far from blood lettings.
I know that a film was attempted of one of these books, with Matt Damon but never gained much box office success. A bit like Lord of the Rings in that various attempts were made before the Peter Jackson Trilogy. I suspect that for the right director these stories will become a fantastic film but at the moment the books themselves are astounding.
The Border Trilogy, 11 Feb 2007
Cormac McCarthy is a unique voice in American fiction. His flowing polysyndetic prose forms a poetic vision of the American West that is almost Biblical in its rythmns. The Border Trilogy is a fable about a last generation of cowboys - John Grady Cole and Billy Parnham - drawn into Mexico on dark odysseys that belie the bloodthirsty beginnings of their own country. It is a voyage that goes way beyond a revision of the Western genre and the re-evaluation of its good vs evil paradym, but into the heart of myth and legend itself - in particular that rooted at the heart of the American experience. Its use of parable, its sense of impending apocalypse and its strangely histrionic dialogue amount to a kind of imagined Biblical testament to the evolution of American culture. A landmark work of literature that left this reader feeling forever changed.
one of my best books ,ever!, 30 Jan 2001
all the pretty horses is incredibly irritating at the beginning- a lack of all punctuation -but you very quickly get used to this, and subsequently all the other books you read seem overloaded with it.this book has the very best fight description (though the prison scene in tom wolfe's 'a man in full' runs a very close second), of any book i've read. this is an incredible, exhilarating read; people who object to the spanish bits they don't get.....well, that's probably the point-the book is not meant to be obvious.
A handsome edition of a major American work, 22 Nov 2000
This handsome edition of McCarthy's completed Border Trilogy in one volume gives the reader one of the most important works of American fiction of the last decades. McCarthy's work is far more than a western, but crosses the borders between fiction and philosophy, the real and the world of dream. With influences ranging from the traditional western; the coming-of-age story; the courtly romance; classical tragedy; and magical realism, McCarthy's masterpiece is a work to be read and read again. This new volume containing all three of the novels, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain, is a welcome addition to the canon of McCarthy's works in print.
No country for old faint-hearts!, 19 Oct 2008
One of Cormac McCarthy's early novels, set in a rural landscape somewhere in a pre-modern Appalachia, "The Outer Dark" is a dark, disturbing story about Rinthy Holme's search for her lost baby, the product of an incestuous union with her brother Culla, who unknown to Rinthy, has abandoned the baby deep in the woods, telling Rinthy he died. The child, left to die, survives, rescued by a tinker.
There's no great depth - or twists - of plot in "The Outer Dark". Rather than plot-driven, the story is structured around two separate journeys made by brother and sister, the narrative cross-cutting intermittently from one journey to the other: Rinthy (on discovery of Culla's lie) travelling the countryside in search of lost child and Culla wandering the woods indeterminately - a structure that allows McCarthy scope at once to describe Rinthy and Culla's wanderings in the landscape they pass through and the mixed-bag of eccentric, grotesque characters they encounter on their travels.
McCarthy's writing is unsurpassed when describing a landscape and its people and their way of life. Marvellous set-pieces involving Rinthy and Culla, in encounters with peculiar cranky backwoods southerners who cross their separate paths - often living in squalor in dilapidated shacks and isolated cabins deep in the woods - are full of sardonic wit and crackling dialogue. Snappy, colourful, these 'run-ins' with crusty 'locals' are the highlights of the novel for this reader.
A dark mood permeates "The Outer Dark". When Culla flees the scene of his evil act, careering through the dark depths of the forest in full flight, his hands are outstretched before him "against whatever the dark might hold". McCarthy creates a strong sense of foreboding and menace. For Culla, whatever the 'dark' might hold, remains to be seen. Out of the 'dark' too, like outcasts straight from Hell, the coming of three terrifying figures roaming the land with murderous intent, manifested in the shock-horror violence of a gruesome, disturbing climax.
Welcome to Cormac McCarthy Country! If you enjoy this walk through the woods, book up for another trip into McCarthy country with "Child of God" and "The Orchard Keeper". Another "loner-living-in-isolated-cabin-in-the-woods" novel you may enjoy is "Julius Winsome" by Gerard Donovan.
One of Mccarthy's most accessible novels. A stunning read., 08 Oct 2008
Mccarthy's language and control of pace are of the highest quality even in this, his second novel. The tale is an allegorical one of consequence, guilt and fate concerning a brother, Culla, and his sister who bears his son at the novels beginning. Culla takes the baby as his sister recovers and leaves it in a forest glade before returning, claiming it had died and been buried. In the meantime a tinker has chanced upon the boy and taken it. When Cullas lie is promptly found he disappears into the appalchian expanse in search of work while his sister tries to track down the tinker.
His sister receives momentus fortune and good-will on her travels while her brother, for his sins, comes across terrible ill-fortune, being suspected of crimes and prompting a hog riot and chancing across many characters who later come to regret meeting him. All the while three savage characters are roaming the land killing and hanging men who have recently strayed across Cullas path.
The prose is haunting and subtly gorgeous and the dialogue is truly brilliant. The book is open to interpretation and I wisely recommend you tackle this before his magnum opus, Blood Meridian. A classic book from, in my opinion, the greatest living American writer.
A Grimm Fairy Tale....., 19 Sep 2008
I came upon this book having worked my way through The Border Trilogy, The Road(my first Cormac McCarthy), No Country for Old Men and latterly Child of God.
Reading Outer Dark gave me the same goosebumps I experienced as a child when I discovered Grimm's Fairy Tales.
That feeling of impending disaster whilst in the grip of horrible fascination which had me wincing in anticipation and ensured that I would read through to the bitter end.
Cormac MCarthy's unrelenting and poetic language engages feelings of sympathy from the start when we discover poor Rinthy giving birth to her brother's child alone and deliberately neglected by him. Thus starts a circular journey of action and reaction as both brother and sister travel their own personal but interlinked journeys.
Into this mix explode three loose-cannon characters who weave in and out of the tale with a malevolent presence that can only lead in one inevitable direction.
The end is as explosively shocking as the beginning.
Cormac MCarthy has the ability to combine sickening brutality with the most deft and delicate nuances of humanity using lean, eccentric and beautiful language. In his writing nothing is squandered, it is pitch perfect. If you like your humour dark and and your stories darker, this is the book for you. It's brilliant stuff.
The best book I have read in 20 years!, 01 Jun 2008
This is the second Cormac McCarthy book I've read, my first being "The Road", which I felt to be a pretty bleak piece, though no less rewarding for that. I enjoyed it enough to try another, and picked "Outer Dark" pretty much at random. Within the first few paragraphs, this book had me completely hooked. The story is a very simple one, employing few (if any) plot complexities to keep the reader interested. Instead, it's the rich portrayal of the protagonists, a varied and fascinating cast of supporting characters, and a darkly evocative "Southern Gothic" setting that keep you utterly transfixed and eager for more. Constant throughout is a carefully balanced sense of foreboding which underpins the story as it builds to its somewhat predictable yet devastating conclusion. This is, without a doubt, the best book I have read in the last 20 years, prompting me to order every other work by this highly talented author! If each of them is half as good as "Outer Dark", I have many hours of wonderful reading ahead!
Excellent early McCarthy, 05 May 2008
I came to this having read several of McCarthy's later books. It is fascinating from this point of view, showing some of the earlier themes and images that one finds recurring throughout his work. One doesn't get as close to the characters in this book as in his later work and the author almost seems to want us to keep our distance and reserve our sympathy (this isn't necessarily a shortcoming, its just how it has been written - although I expect some will find it frustrating). The language as in all his work is absolutely superb. The content is fairly chilling but an excellent read.
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Customer Reviews
Harrowing. try not to cry at the end like i did., 19 Nov 2008
The Dialouge: spare rhythmical exchange between father and son in a post apocolyptic hell world. ( I believed every word they said to each other, Realism!!! so amazing)
The Writing: some good similies. the Father's thoughts are beautiful and realistic.
The Story: The Father and son are 100 percent beleivable. it felt real. it all felt real. The story has been done before in comic books to death--nice to see it done in a realistic manner.
you, your children, your grandparents should read this., 17 Nov 2008
This is a chilling look ahead. A brilliant writer. Read this with somebody else in the house and phone access to a therapist. This man is my favourite modern American author.
Less would have been More, 16 Nov 2008
I am truly surprised by all the positive reviews. I can't agree. The author has done much better in his previous work (The Plains Trilogy). It is extremely repetitive and endless. It could have been a short story, which would have been more effective.
Carry the fire, 13 Nov 2008
I was initially surprised to hear that `The Road`, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and his son's quest for survival in an America that has befallen some unspecified environmental or nuclear catastrophe. All animal life has disappeared, including most human life, and ash covers everything. Food is scarce, and the survivors have resorted to murder, theft and in some cases slavery and cannibalism. The man and his boy travel the eponymous `Road' to the coast, a quest without any clear objective bar the possibility of encountering other `good guys', and avoiding the `bad guys' as much as possible. Distinguishing whom is whom, however, is not easy, and the tension created by this is brilliantly rendered. Furthermore, and perhaps even more evocatively, is the way McCarthy depicts the protagonists' struggle against the elements in an unyieldingly huge and savage landscape. Their need to huddle together to sustain warmth in the winter nights is as palpable as their paranoia about getting caught by the `bad guys'.
The Road is ultimately a novel about the depth of a father's love for his son (the novel is dedicated to John Francis McCarthy) and his will to protect him at any cost. Thus, McCarthy reserves some faith in the endurance of the human spirit - referred to on several occasions directly as a "fire" that the protagonist's endeavour to keep burning - despite framing man as culpable for his own catastrophe. It's also a hymn to nature's brutal permanence - there is no suggestion that the world itself is poised to end, just that humanity is on the brink. Not exactly `28 Days Later' then, with much of the threat (flesh-eating paedophiles etc.) more suggestive than explicit, and all the more frightening for it.
Survival - or "issues of life and death", as the author put it in one interview - is a theme in many of McCarthy's books, from the `Border Trilogy` to `No Country for Old Men'. His characters often undergo transformative and transgressive experiences on the margins of civilisation, often pitted against the wilds or manifestations of evil ("the bad guys" again) that seem more spectral, or at least representative, than necessarily `real'. Like his frontier-centred novels, The Road is in deep awe of the American wilderness - it's desolate beauty, it's emptiness. Has a more desolate novel ever been written? I haven't read one. Carry the fire.
Yes I am. I am the one., 06 Nov 2008
Most of what needs to be said to prospective readers of this book has probably been said by the reviewers below. But the most affecting aspect for me was definitely the relationship between The Boy and The Man.
For The Man, all that he does is focussed on saving The Boy. Both in a physical sense and in a fighting to maintain a spark of the old world's human decency within his son - to keep him "carrying the fire". But in reality, the fire is burning bright in The Boy in a world where elsewhere it has mostly been firmly extinguished. And in the end, it becomes clear that The Man needed The Boy to save him, and what goodness was left in him, far more.
The best book I've read in a long time.
My book of the year., 19 Nov 2008
I loved this book. I enjoyed it so much that I didn`t see the movie. This is America`s top modern author, no question. He just gets better.He understands the human condition when set against a bleak or rugged backcloth, he writes so well.
Worst book ever, 06 Nov 2008
What starts out a promising & exciting story, completely falls apart in the final few chapters. I was so disappointed with this that I threw it in the bin when I finished it (and I have been collecting books all my life). Avoid
Very confusing, 23 Oct 2008
I'm sure this is an exciting novel if you can cope with the style, but I found it very confusing. McCarthy shares a characterstic with Gerald Seymour in that he will write several paragraphs or even pages without saying whom he is writing about (ie he uses personal pronouns rather than names). For me, Seymour gets away with it - just - but in this book it simply serves to complicate a plot which is quite complicated enough. I found this disappointing, because I think that otherwise I might well have enjoyed the novel. As it was, it left me confused, and unsure as to exactly what happened at the end.
Awesome, 07 Oct 2008
It has been years since I read a Cormac McCarthy and I had forgotten just what a fantastic writer he is, one of the best living American writers for sure and deserved of all the praise heaped on him.
A slimmer book than many of his others, and difficult to read without having the film in mind (which is quite faithful to this), but there are one or two scenes that are crucial to the themes of the novel that you wonder why they never made it into the movie.
The narrative voices are superb. And the economy of the language that you just wish that British writers could master, but you realise this is something that seems to run through good American writers' veins and cannot be acquired.
He is the nearest writer I have seen to a modern-day Faulkner.
A true master and I think it is time I re-read some of his earlier novels.
A great read, 30 Jul 2008
Don't know how anyone can give this less than 5. I enjoyed this almost as much as the film (which I believe the Coens chopped and changed to perfection). Cormac McCarthy is one of my favourite authors and this is a brilliant read. The ending is a matter of taste but I believe it is fresh and original and serves the story perfectly. Just adding my two cents to try and up the average star rating.
A journey to the dark side, 28 Sep 2008
A long time ago a very astute reviewer said of Herman Melvilles great novel Moby Dick,"A polar wind blows through it and and birds of prey hover over it". A very fitting description of Cormac McCarthys "Blood Meridian" which it resembles.Both the Judge and Ahab are the Devil personified. Both lead their men to destruction over time and vast forbidding terrains. Ahab over the savage seas and The Judge over the stark lunar landscapes of the West. The characters in both books head towards inexorable destruction.
The book is a Western set in that time and place. But it does not slot easily into that genre. I can think of no Western that I can compare it with. Alan LeMays character Amos Edwards in "The Searchers" is a similarly dark character but he is not the devil himself. Aside from Moby Dick I can only compare it with certain Old Testament passages or perhaps an eighteenth century Gothic horror story. The setting I feel is irrelevant. I note one reviewer has read this novel five times such was its power. It has a terrifying beauty that has the strange ability to transfix you like the Gorgons head. You know you are looking at dark forces but are unable to avert your eyes. You are appalled yet compelled. I can understand the compulsion to go back to this book again and again. Could I ? I dont believe so. The novel is just too deep a look into mans heart of darkness. But read it once you must. The power of McCarthys writing takes the breath away. It possesses a strange biblical cadence. Yes it is also visceral, have no illusions, but for all that it is some of the most potent stuff I have read. He has his own unique style which the truly great painters and film makers possessed and he is stamped with the same hallmarks of greatness. Dare I say I believe his writing is as visionary as any of the last centuries writers. A bold claim I know. I can think of no author who can describe landscape better. Contemporary or otherwise. Only time will testify to the truth of this statement. McCarthy can make an unpromising plot mesmerising. Read "The Crossing" to evidence this.
Blood Meridian is set in the 1840s American/Mexican West. It covers the activities of a gang of scalphunters who leave rivers of blood in their wake. It was a period when this area was being laid waste in a scorched earth policy carried out by the Apache Indians. Mexico just South of the border was particularly hard hit. The Apache had warred with the Mexicans for centuries. The hatred ran deep between the two and atrocities were an everyday occurrence. The perfect setting for the nightmare vision that is Blood Meridian.
One can read many things into this book. Many of which may be correct. You must read it yourself and interpret it in your own way. Reading can be a very personal journey. For myself I just saw a rapid and spiralling descent into the dark recesses of the human soul. Aside from the Judge the other characters are not worth mentioning other than to say that they have not a single redeeming feature amongst them. They are a glimpse into those dark places where mans worst vices lurk. No depravity is beneath them. But there is a price to be paid come the final reckoning. They will be judged. The Devil himself lies in wait. He does not age and he laughs at the folly of men. He sees that man never learns from past mistakes. They keep him in business. This keeps him happy so that he can play his fiddle and dance to the end of time.
Far from his best, 15 Sep 2008
While there's always merit in McCarthy's prose, this book suffers badly from a lack of a plot. It's not much more than a collection of well written and interesting massacres.
Bloody and a Little Tedious, 12 Jul 2008
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian traces the kid, that is all we know him as, on an abominable adventure. The story traverse the wild west of the Texas and Mexico border landscape. It depicts the debauchery of a gang of rebels led by someone known as the judge and a character called Glanton. This gang ride on and on committing pointless pillage and murder. The reader is drawn into a beautiful rugged terrain where there is little or no sense of society and certainly no moral compass.
Blood Meridian does not depend on story telling in a conventional sense. Rather the novel's structure and execution is reminiscence of a fly on the wall documentary. The narrator holds the camera and points it at a series of events that is observed. This approach is clearly hightlied by the fact that each chapter summarises events in a pithy manner. Further, as the story progresses paragraph after paragraph begins in this manner: "They rode on, They paused without the cantina, They had lost four men" and so on in a deadpan manner. This approach has the effect of wearing down the reader.
For me the above presents a major flaw with the novel. McCarthy simply report events. Indeed, the novel is said to be based on true events that took place in the nineteenth century. There was no moral dilema for the band of rogues, there was no psychological conflict for any of the characters nor was there any conflict between the individual and his social milieu. As I read, I kept repeating to myself tell me something I don't already know or could researh in the relevant history. In other words, the novel is meant to reveal something new in the story it tells. Arguably, that is one of things that distinguishes it from mere story telling.
Nonetheless, it cannot be said of McCarthy's characters that they operate outside a social context. The politico/social world in which the chracters operate is a Hobbesian one, where the: "Life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." We know this because the narrator tells us that: "Here beyond men's judgment all covenants were brittle." In this new world men (for it is men who rape and plunder) are asserting themselves and the weak becomes vanquished. Ironically, if McCarthy purports Christian values then even God is unable to help. In one passage the kid enters a church to discover: "There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who'd barricaded themselves in this house of God against the heathen."
The impact of reading Blood Meridian is that one is left feeling battered by its relentless visciousness and barbarity. The diction of the prose is one of repetitive cruelty. In one pragraph the kid and his prisoner companions saw: "blackeyed young girls ..., a pack of vicious looking human ..., riders wearing scapulars or neckless of dried and blackened human ears." The prose also conjures up a sense of black-darkness. Many of McCarty's adjectives are compound words made up of black, for example blackeye, blackened and blackhaired. Along with the fact that the Indians are labelled: "half naked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh," someone with a politically correct bent would accuse at least McCarty's narrator of racism.
What lifts McCarthy's narrative from its depressing bleakness is at times his marvellous descriptive writing. Here is an example that comes alive in onomatopoeia fashion: "The first cries of birds in the trees along the river and the clink of harness and the snuffle of horses and the gentle sound of their cropping." These sounds are set in the predawn dark so even though we cannot visualise the scene we nonetheless get a good image of it by the sounds. This is first rate writing.
However, McCarthy's style is a mixed bag of the impenetrable and the transparent. In places the syntax of McCarthy's sentences is biblical in style. For example, "Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no sould save he." On the other hand, the use of figurative language captures and evokes the desolate landscape very well. For instance, "... where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus."
About a third of the way through this book, I felt that I had the measure of it and as I was not enjoying it I should cease reading it any further. Nonetheless, I ploughed on and discovered some passages of great writing. However, the sum of these great passages does not make up for a whole book that could be called great.
Disappointing: Not as engrossing as other McCarthy Novels, 13 Jun 2008
I have already read several Cormac McCarthy novels and found them all thoroughly entertaining, emotional and thought provoking. I am sorry to say that I found 'Blood Meridian' quite disappointing; in fact, I stopped reading it just over 3/4 of the way in as I was getting bored with it and just couldn't be bothered to finish it. Despite it clearly being a work of McCarthy, with his fantastic descriptive techniques and conversational style of writing, the story just did not hold my attention or provoke my interest in the same way his other works did.
The plot covers an ever-changing selection of male characters, with a few that are prominent and have an enduring-presence, who are involved in the 'Indian' wars of the 1840s in West Texas and Mexico. They are essentially mercenaries, except that there is very little discrimination as to who, or what, is killed nor whether a reward will actually be forthcoming for their 'work'.
There is an extreme level of violence, a lot of it is senseless and unprovoked and it goes largely unexplained or justified. Whilst I was not put-off by that violence (or lack of reasoning for it), it was essentially this and other repetitive occurrences which dominate the plot, with nothing else of enough note happening to maintain my attention. I believe the main premise of the novel is to highlight that indiscriminate and brutal violence, but I don't think that was good enough reason to justify it being fictionalised with no other significant elements to the tale.
For me, the magic of McCarthy's writing is that despite there rarely being an all-encompassing plot, an interest is maintained by a combination of being interested in his fascinating characters and/or the wry humour associated with their story.
Blood Meridian has one interesting character (The Judge), but he does appear until some way into the novel nor feature p | | |