Rumored to be in production for the big screen, the film version is either going to leave out more parts than Ron Howard left out of A Beautiful Mind or the MPAA is going to have to invent a new rating category.
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. Published 1985, Random House.
Hoo boy, this one's gonna be dark.
Plot Summary
(Spoilers. Howdy, howdy, howdy.)
Meet boy, which is all the narrator ever calls him. Careful, this one's a biter.
Boy's not much fer fancy book lernin', so he hits the road to find the American Dream, and soon enough the American Dream goes off the rails, as it is wont to do. Boy avails himself of much boozing and wenching, legal drinking and wenching ages not yet forced upon the citizenry by an oppressive federal government. This is, after all, the Good Ole Days. Within a fistful of pages, boy kills a bartender, helps burn down a hotel, beats a few random strangers to death, and gets shot twice.
Boy, boy, crazy boy.
I provide these details up front so you know what you're in for (and trust me, it's downhill from here. Oliver this ain't). The squeamish might want to skip ahead to the denouement.
Boy winds up in Texas and bumps into Captain White, leader of a paramilitary group recruiting talent for a trip into the bush. They're going to invade Mexico, because the U.S. government won't. Sort of the 1850's version of the Tea Party, but riding horses instead of hoverounds. Or something. To be honest, it's not clear what their beef is, but apparently it has something to do with the French (plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose). Anyhoo, off they go, all 46 of them, boy in tow. And with predictable results, the Mexican border region being even less hospitable in the 19th century than it is today.
Many of the men fall to disease, probably cholera given the typical water quality of the time. The rest of the men fall to a more overt pathology, that being one of spears and arrows that sprout suddenly from their torsos courtesy of the locals, who are rather cross these days what with European immigrants pushing west and building condos on their sacred burial grounds. Not to mention filling those burial grounds with their women and children. And burning their settlements. And poisoning their wells. And stealing their livestock.
Boy escapes the melee, I guess by hiding inside a dead Tonton, while the indians rob, mutilate, and, um, rape, the dead and dying. Boy makes for friendly territory, but lacking food, water, and OnStar (tm), he is soon captured by the very Mexicans his compadres swore to defeat a scant few pages back. He is summarily thrown in jail, and in a Mexican supermax you don't exactly get Nintendo and conjugal visits, at least not ones of your choosing. Mostly, boy just cools his heels while the local governor decides which manner of public execution his constituents would find the most entertaining.
Hulking hairless albino, with nary an eyelash and even fewer scruples. If this were a Neal Stephenson novel, the judge would have POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattooed across his forehead. The judge, as we shall see, is so hateful, so violent, so amoral, yet so eerily charming, that English grad students have written entire Ph.D. dissertations exploring whether the character is intended as flesh and blood or is a symbolic representation of evil. Indeed, everyone from Milton to Kate Bush assures us the devil is a charming man.
Turns out the judge witnessed boy burning down the hotel lo those many pages ago and, impressed by his motivation and skillset (what was called "gumption" back in the day) has dropped by to spring boy from prison. The careful reader will note this transpires several hundred miles away and many weeks after the hotel fire, a machination I have elsewhere called the "Gandalf Effect," wherein characters make inexplicable sudden appearances as needed throughout the story to move things along.
The judge's interest in boy is not altruistic; rather, he is acting at the behest of John Joel Glanton, leader of a paramilitary group recruiting talent for a trip into the bush. There's injun troubles, don't ya know, and the west of the time being an Old Testament kind of place, local governments have taken to hiring street toughs from north of the border to smote the heathens old school. Specifically, they have given Glanton's gang permits to trade scalps at $100 a peel, which they can use to buy whiskey, tortillas. and trips upstairs at the Belle Union. Any possible symbolism of a weak foreign government paying Americans to kill the local troublemakers I shall leave to the reader.
The gang signs up boy and also the skeevy earless Toadvine, an ex-con who actually does have POOR IMPULSE CONTROL written across his forehead, having been branded for easy identification during a prior sojourn in a Texas correctional facility. The careful reader will note that Toadvine is somehow in the Mexican prison with boy even though last we saw or heard of him was when they burned down the hotel together back on page 13. See "Gandalf Effect."
Our gang heads off to track the Apaches. After many (many) pages of tracking, the Apaches make the tragic mistake of leading Glanton to an encampment of their women and children. Butchery begins in earnest.
The John Ford cliche, wherein cowboy-on-indian violence is depicted vis-a-vis scenes of dazed survivors stumbling through smoky yet oddly picturesque ruins of the camp does not suffice here, as it omits the more troubling (and, alas, documented) practices of the baby smashing, and the corpse raping, and the setting on fire of the horses, and the ripping of scalps from the still living. McCarthy spares us no dark detail. If Bosch had directed Dancing with Wolves or if there was a Red Dead Redemption mod for Manhunt you'd be in the ballpark.
The tide of the battle shifts, mostly depending upon which poor bastard finds himself alone and encircled by a bazillion angry armed savages from the other side, much like the scene in Winged Migration where that Spotted Booby sets down on the beach with a bum wing and gets instantly ripped to shreds by a rush of hermit crabs that come out of nowhere. Still, the smart money is on Team Glanton, armed to the teeth as they are with state-of-the-art six shooters. As the saying goes, God may have made man, but Sam Colt made man into a pile of goo that buzzards eat.
At this point, Glanton's interpretation of his mission statement gets a little creative. Let's skim a bit:
Our heroes stop by a local grotto for some R&R. There is a perceived slight from one of the locals, so they kill everyone.
Our heroes stop by a local hacienda for some R&R. There is a perceived slight from one of the locals, so they kill everyone.
Our heroes stop by a local bar for some R&R. There is a perceived slight from one of the locals, so they kill everyone.
There's a few more cycles of this. Variants where women or barnyard animals are present get a little rapey. There's puppy drowning, and pack mule squishing, and several episodes of underage drinking. Oh, and a dead baby tree, because of course there is. All-the-while, our guys collect scalps from the dead whenever possible (because, hey, free scalp). It's like granddaddy used to say: Once the government starts buying hair, everyone starts to look like a scalp.
The governor starts to notice that the scalps his mercenaries are turning in of late are rather fair-skinned. When reports of mayhem and hotel-wrecking begin pouring in from the surrounding communities, he revokes the gang's hunting license and puts a price on Glanton's head. Clearly the governor is unschooled in American political theory, wherein criminals acting at the government's behest (e.g., Oliver North, Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay) are post hoc taken to the nation's bosom, not vilified and imprisoned. But I digress.
In a manner that would inspire Chris de Burgh many years later, the gang's ferry service quickly deteriorates from helping customers for an exorbitant fee, to not helping customers for an exorbitant fee, to simply robbing, raping, and murdering the customers. Who among us working in the service industry has not contemplated such a turn of events?
So do they finally wake more than the dogs.
Setting up shop at the river crossing is a tactical blunder, Glanton forgetting the whole point of being a marauding band of outlaws is the "marauding" part. Once you put down roots, running roughshod over the neighbors becomes a delicate affair as they now have recourse to regroup and bring the fight to your door at a time of their choosing. Everyone from Tony Montana to Bernie Madoff has learned this the hard way. So do our heroes.
Blowback arrives in the guise of the Yumas, a local indian tribe whom Glanton double-crossed after they helped him appropriate the ferry. One would think the Yumas would understand the occasional headless squaw is simply the cost of doing business, but no. Long story short: Glanton's gang is wiped out by the Yumas, transfixed on pointed sticks all save for boy, Toadvine, Tobin, and Davy Brown. Oh, and the judge, who is last seen walking the desert leading on a leash an imbecile whom he has taken for a pet. Toadvine, Tobin, and Brown are hanged in short order.
Boy decides what with puberty coming on it's time for a career change.
Fast forward a few years. Boy is now an investment banker, having learned cipherin' from a young widow he met traveling west on the Oregon trail. Cholera took her Jessib, don't ya know. They weather agin the elements and injuns, forging a close bond in the crucible of their struggles. Alas, one night, huddled together amidst the cold of an approaching thunderstorm, their eyes meet and they kiss. Fast forward again. The couple have a nice split-level in Minnesota and boy is now assistant manager of the First National Bank of Northfield (bonus trivia: 15 years later the bank would become the last robbed by Jessie James, his gang being ambushed there by law enforcement and members of the Pinkertons). Boy and the missus have four children, but the first three are lost to scarlet fever. The last child is a breach birth and Mrs. Boy dies in delivery. Boy lays flowers on her grave every Christmas until his death in 1890. His surviving son grows up to become the first mayor of Deadwood. The End.
Oh, who am I kidding? Fast forward a few years. Boy runs into the judge in a bar and the judge rapes him to death and stuffs his corpse down an outhouse. The End.
VERDICT
The cover blurb on my copy calls Blood Meridian "a classic American novel of regeneration through violence." I don't know what that means, but it sounds like the sort of thing you write if you work for the New York Times Book Review and don't want to be replaced by one of those robots that play Jeopardy.
Still, you may be wondering: why would anyone wade through all this blood and mayhem?
That's a fair question, and it forces me to admit that my snarky review does a genuine disservice to Blood Meridian in that it fails completely the the essence of the novel.
The essence is the writing.
It is as if McCarthy is possessed by the spirit of Melville or Dante. To say that Blood Meridian is about violence is to say that Moby Dick is about fishing or The Inferno is about hell. The novel reads like an epic poem -- Beowulf updated for a modern audience. The monster is no longer a primordial beast of nature but rather a demon in the shape of men, conjured by Manifest Destiny and which haunts the DNA of America to this very day.
Consider this passage, where McCarthy introduces boy (p. 3):
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.A Mennonite warns boy of the consequences of Captain White's actions (p. 40):
The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.Here is McCarthy describing the beauty of the harsh western landscape (p. 44):
They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and 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 until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.And again (p. 172):
Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.A glimpse into Glanton's psyche (p. 243):
He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequences and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.The judge, on the nature of man (p. 146):
If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and flower and to die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.These excerpts are not occasional bursts of inspired wordcraft, but rather a tone McCarthy sustains over the entire 300+ page run of the novel. It is what elevates Blood Meridian to epic poem, in much the way David Milch's obscenity-laced scripts elevated Deadwood to modern Shakespeare. It is at once exhausting and astonishing.
All the more impressive is that Blood Meridian was both a critical and commercial success (although not initially) and there currently exist rumors of a film adaptation. This on top of McCarthy's other critical and commercial success, including an Oscar for No Country for Old Men. In a world of manufactured pop tarts, auto-tuned divas, and "artists" who can't tell the difference between being a mathematician and winning the lottery, it's a comfort that someone with genuine talent actually got traction in the entertainment biz.
Thank you, Universe. For once you did something that did not incite within LabKitty a taste for mindless violence.
Grade: A
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Cover image and excerpts from Blood Meridian claimed as fair use under provisions of United States copyright law as these illustrate an article discussing the work in question and do not in a reasonable person's mind constitute an infringement of the owner's rights to receive compensation for the copyrighted work.
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