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Why Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian Is The Most Overrated Novel Of The 20th Century
The narrative is essentially that of the traditional ‘hero’s journey’, only Blood Meridian has no hero. It is simply the epic journey of a dickhead...
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is one of those books that I have been aware of for years: it always seems to crop up on those “bestest ever books in the world ever” lists that every magazine and newspaper seems to do these days. I quite liked McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and The Road is a perfect tale of post-apocalyptic desperation, with just enough warmth and hope to keep you hooked. This book failed to keep me hooked though, and at about the half-way mark it felt like a slow trudging trawl through thick mud.
Blood Meridian is an epic Western set in the mid-1800s in the American south and Mexico. The narrative follows “the Kid”, a brutally violent teenage boy who commits murderous acts without flinching. Though he is the protagonist of the story, we learn very little of the Kid’s previous life before we join him meandering from one murderous gang of scalp-hunters to the next. We know that his mother died in childbirth and that his father lives in Texas. We only get to know the Kid through his actions – we never have access to his thoughts or feelings. It’s difficult to call the Kid a protagonist. Although I think he’s meant to be, he comes across as such a complete and utter dickhead that there is no possible way that anyone apart from the most ardent of sociopaths could possibly relate to him.
This might explain why Blood Meridian was such a trial to read: the narrative is essentially that of the traditional ‘hero’s journey’, only Blood Meridian has no hero. It is simply the epic journey of a dickhead.
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Perhaps the most interesting character in the story is Judge Holden, referred to throughout the novel as simply the Judge. He is the only character in the novel that is well-educated. He often preaches about Gnostic notions of fatalism, and believes that through careful cataloguing and observation, it is possible not only to understand the world, but also to conquer it. He is a strange character because he seems at points to be an incredibly sensitive character: he draws; he meditates; he considers the big questions in life. But, the Judge, like the Kid, has a penchant for murder and brutality. It is not mindless however, as he has thought deeply about the nature of violence, believing that man’s natural state is that of war.
I felt that in writing Blood Meridian, McCarthy revelled in creating needlessly violent and disturbing imagery – at first this was quite shocking, but when every other road was lined with the skulls of dead babies; or the rotting corpses of dead babies; or had babies hanging from trees, or having their heads smashed in during one of the novel’s many massacres, it got a bit tiresome. When another man had his eyes gouged out; was decapitated; impaled; scalped; bludgeoned with a medieval mace; stabbed in the eye with a beer bottle; or beaten beyond recognition, the descriptions were so graphic and gratuitous that they verged on the pornographic.
It felt as though McCarthy tried so desperately to create disturbing and shocking images that it quickly became puerile and adolescent. It reminded me of one of those insanely violent videogames that are just so silly in their violence that it is impossible to find it truly shocking. Used sparingly, these images of extreme inhumanity could have been incredibly poignant and moving, but instead they are normalised within the novel and lose their impact quite quickly.
As well as being stupidly violent, Blood Meridian was sickeningly macho. Every character was a man’s man: violent cowboys who liked to fight and drink and ride around on horses. It seemed that every single time one of them spoke, they would have to spit and wipe their mouth, usually before, during and after each segment of dialogue. To keep myself entertained, I kept trying guess how long it would be before someone spat and wiped their mouth – it happened surprising frequently.
I think what annoyed me more than anything else in this book was the sheer effort that it took to read some of McCarthy’s sentences. I’ve read some pretty challenging stuff in my time, but sentences like this just took the piss:
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
And breathe.
When another man had his eyes gouged out; was decapitated; impaled; scalped or beaten beyond recognition, the descriptions were so graphic and gratuitous that they verged on the pornographic.
I love cumulative syntax if done properly, but 245 words is unnecessarily long for a sentence. It may make grammatical sense, and it may conjure up some interesting imagery, but is it well-written, was it necessary, did it add to the story? The answer, for me at least, is a resounding no. I wish that this was the only example of an unnecessarily long exercise in creative writing, but the book is littered with descriptions like this on every other page. It gets quite trying, and is quickly rendered redundant by its own pomposity. It is almost as though McCarthy is desperately screaming to his readers: “this is literature!”
Perhaps I’m being unfair to Blood Meridian, and I’m sure people will tell me that I didn’t get it, or that it should be read metaphorically. Indeed, the one element of the novel that I found intriguing was the landscape itself: meticulously crafted, and always pointing towards some prophetic fallacy.
McCarthy’s ability to evoke an all-encompassing sense of bleakness and hopelessness come to the fore when writing about the world that surround his characters: this was true in No Country for Old Men, and was the main feature of The Road. In Blood Meridian he writes of a landscape “whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.”
I might not have enjoyed how McCarthy told the story, but at least I certainly enjoyed his landscapes.
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COMMENTS
Good article, well written. Allow me to be the first to disagree though. I found Blood Meridian to be an exceptional, if challenging, read. It is a novel closer to a poem or painting than a straight literaturary exercise. The violence is difficult but as with American Psycho it becomes interwoven with the whole feel of the novel, the readers eventual indifference to it reflects positively on the overall setting and desperatly brutal feel that McCarthy was trying to build.I personally think it is a masterpiece.
No. It's ace.
Sociopaths can't relate. That's the whole point. By historical accounts the Glanton Gand did exactly what you're accusing McCarthy of doing - reveling in needless violence. It'd be odd to write or read a story about a bunch of scalp hunters and then expect the gore to be low key. Judge Holden is one of the best bad guys I've read in any book, ever, and the kid, in my opinion, is meant to be a blank slate. Later, towards the end of the story he becomes a bit more human, but even then, it never felt that the reader was meant to understand the Kid on a more intimate level. The violence is kind of the point of the novel. I think McCarthy purposely wanted to eschew the notions of the white 'Hero of the West' and depict these archetypal gunslingers in a colder light of day - as greedy, blood-thirsty nutters who killed for pleasure. As for the long sentences, I didn't find them such a trial. Ulysses and The Rotters' Club piss all over 245 words. Obviously it's all a matter of opinion, but "unnecessarily long" sentences seems to be a bit of a lame critique.
Never been a fan of Blood Meridian, but the prose as quoted stands up well against your insipid, sub-A level, everybloke crit.
Not read it and from your review I probably won't, good article nevertheless, thank you. @Joe - He's written a review not a complimentary short story, get a grip.
You are wrong. This book is brilliant.
Bob, shouldn't that be complementary? I'm not asking that he write like McCarthy, just someone who's fit to wipe the man's crack, given it's the quality of the writing that is under discussion
"I wish that this was the only example of an unnecessarily long exercise in creative writing, but the book is littered with descriptions like this on every other page. It gets quite trying, and is quickly rendered redundant by its own pomposity." You just don't get it, do you?
shithouse
I appreciate any constructive criticism and feedback about my writing. As an emerging writer, I am still trying to find my voice. Comments like Joe’s aren’t useful as they only serve to undermine and belittle rather than provide anything meaningful or useful, and it makes you come across as a bit twatty. I usually write about video games and music, and this is the fourth book review I’ve ever written. I’ve never studied literature, and nor do I claim to have. I enjoy literature, and this is a book that I didn’t enjoy but felt compelled to write about.
Hey Joe write us a review pal
"Why Shakespeare's Othello was a wanker"
@Joe - 'Complementary', you are quite correct. To quote Mother Teresa of Calcutta "Oh, fucking dog's cock". I stand both humbled and corrected.
Looking forward to your future pieces, like Why Radiohead are the most overrated band on planet Earth and Why o2 exchange is the most overrated lung function
You sir are wrong. Blood Meridian is one of the best, and historically acurate, western novels out there. In my opinion, it is not McArthy's best - try Child of God and/or Outer Dark
I agree. I stopped reading about a third in, simply fed up with it. Totally agree with you about his depictions of men and of violence. I liked his border trilogy though(especially all the pretty horses) - just couldn't get with this, or the road for that matter.
Joe, you sound like Brian fucking Sewell.
Tackling Blood Meridian as a fourth review is no mean feat, so hats off for that, but I don't think Joe is completely wrong. The critique seems to essentially be on what the book is about, and a secondary complaint on how it uses drawn out descriptions needlessly. This strikes me as odd because it's the evocation of landscapes that are seen as a redeeming feature. Surely CM employed similarly structured prose to the one quoted for that positive aspect, too? Moreover, the book doesn't pretend to be anything other than a violent, very descriptive depiction of overly macho characters doing very bad things. With that in mind, it all seems more about the answering of a question of personal taste, which is fair enough, but it wouldn’t be a review that would turn me off reading it at had I not done so. To say comments like Joe's aren't useful is a moot point. People will comment of what each other write and will inevitably disagree in any way they see fit. Taking snipes at what you’ve written is par for the course. By calling the ‘offender’ “twatty”, it kind of reduces you to their level, and undermines the very ambitious task of reviewing a much vaunted work. Then, to profess one hasn't studied literature having employed the supposed misuse of cumulative syntax as a reason for calling BM "the most overrated novel of the 20th Century", does makes it all seem a bit flawed.
Never trust a writer who uses 'quite," let alone a writer show uses it a handful of times.
I read this article from a prejudiced perspective: I knew instantly that I wouldn’t agree with the writer’s viewpoint, but hey, I can be persuaded occasionally. Someone commented that this piece was ‘well written’ and I somewhat agree. However, the writer’s inclusion of the sentence that ‘took the piss’ only served to show his own writing failings. McCarthy writes with a severe disregard for the rules of punctuation, allowing for flow and meter and trope to roll from the tongue. This article - surrounding 245 words of genius - was cluttered and stunted with comma overuse and ‘look! I know how to use a semi colon’ signs. He could have chosen any long sentence from Blood Meridian to prove his point. Instead, he chose the one that didn’t. He sarcastically told us to breathe: I gasped.
Hate to be the first to say "you didn't get it" because I certainly don't "get" Blood Meridian after only 4 read throughs, but you shouldn't expect to relate to characters in BM. The only real character is the omnipotent narrator and its manifestation in Judge Holden.
I just... fuck it. fuck it all. i give up.
Sir, you are incorrect. And I dare say, a dickhead as well.
Stick to reviewing the video games friend, they'll be more suited to your cognitive ability.
You'll not fool me with this pseudonym, Nicholas Sparks!
"but 245 words is unnecessarily long for a sentence" yes it is. 244 would have been so much better. yes, the violence is like video game violence. yes, you have been aware of this book for years and no doubt it has been aware of you like a pretty girl at your local youth club disco watching you wander around in ever decreasing circles before you pounce, bring her home and realise you have no cock to intercourse her. yes, its sickeningly macho. I too ached for Strictly Dancing scenes or X Factor dramas. I too lamented this hard world Mr McCarthy has created. I too love cumulative syntax if done properly instead of the way that Mr McCarthy uses it to show the spilling out into the world of existence the essence of our being here and the violence that begets us from cradle to grave while the winds of war rage all around us in a free for all by here comes everyone as we slaughter each other's mortality but i digress i would have preferred brevity from Mr McCarthy. Perhaps I am being unfair. Perhaps not. Dear Reader If you are a reader and love literature then take this book and bleed your eyes out for a few hours and leave this child alone. PS I think your editor is trying to getting rid of you by inducing professional suicide. Best of luck. I'll stop laughing now.
I completely agree with you. I read the road and was completely floored by it's darkness. It was so very awesome. I then looked to find that this particular book was listed as one of the greatest books of all time. So I bought it on amazon and it was sooooo fucking boooring! I could give less a shit about these characters after page 30 and kept thinking when the hell is Cormac gonna give me a reason to? I think anyone that raves about this book is probably a pretentious prick who drinks coffee at starbucks and bores the shit out of people with meaningless details of their own life while the listening party keeps trying to interject and leave politely...but this fucking guy keeps talking about shit that nobody cares about because to himeach and every word is pure gold and there's really no value that embraces dynamic. This book lacked just that..I've heard the last 50 pages are stellar and I've started reading them..so far so good..but the reast of the book is just so fucking drab I wanted to punch myself repeatedly in the scrotum to feel something. This book lacked emotion and seemed Cormac just wrote it off the top of his head as if he meant to edit it at one point but it would have ended up being to short so he said..to hell with it, I'm just gonna throw everything in there cause I'm that fucking special. Well You're not dude, I know it's been thirty years but you need to go back and edit all the fluffy shit out of this 'masterpiece'' and then it might actually be as good as everyone says it is. Other than that there are better books that deserve the type of recognition and praise this one recieved.
Yeah- your opinion is available but clearly it s wrong
To claim that the kid's father is from Texas not only betrays a failure to read the first page of the novel, but also an egregious failure to grasp the historical context of the landscape that you claimed to enjoy. I do agree, however, that cm's apparent effort to seem "literary" with this one (perhaps under the pressure of living off of his MacArthur grant) is fair game to be labeled off-putting. Would you say the same, however, of Moby Dick? Paradise Lost? Inferno? Likely not, if only because they are initiated into the pantheon of classic literature. Many esteemed critics (NOT just Bloom, though a google search may give that impression) have suggested that Blood Meridian bears comparison to these works, so perhaps, in attempting to tell us that the book IS literature, McCarthy has overwhelmingly succeeded.
I'm about 2/3rds through this novel. It was recommended to me by my nephew who told me it was his all-time favorite book. He is a freaking genius and grad student at Reed College in Portland. I read all the time and love it, everyday. I'm not like a lot of you guys that are experts on the classics and all but I still love reading, stuff like Asimov, King, Tolkien etc. Anyway, I tend to agree with Jon. We have access to no ones feelings in this book, just mindless violence and long sentences that go on with vague references to more fog! The Judge is the only character that we have some kind of insight to. Even though he is a crazed insane killer, he is educated and likes to document different species. I have to have a dictionary and a Spanish to English translator site handy to know what he is writing about. I am going to finish this book and may try "No country for old men", I loved the movie! I am going to recommend a couple of writers to my nephew, since he seems to like raw honest themes. I will tell him to check out "Ask the Dust", John Fante and Factotum, Buckowski. Hank
Well, I finished the book tonight and I can say that I'm glad I did! I'm not going to leave a spoiler:) I'm still kind of spaced... So, what's the next book should I order from amazon? It seems like there are many to choose from. This was my first but like I said, I liked the movie, "no country for old men". I guess no one even checks this blog anymore so this is probably in vain:) Hank
Your an idiot, fuck yourself and die
I wasn't going to remark on this piece but, having read the previous comment, I now have to ask, what sort of person names their child Eat? I appreciate that if your surname is Shit it must be hard to select a Christian name that sits well, but there must be many better options than Eat.
The most overrated novel of the twentieth century? Bit bold, isn't it? How do you feel about Finnegans Wake?
The fact that we gain no access to individuals psychologies in the novel is part of the point. At the text's core is a philosophical argument that 'history is written by the winners', and that in history ACTION is all that matters. Action i.e. what people do, not what they think or even what they say. Hence all the significant plot points and practically all of the character's actions are historically viable in one way or another. Psychology is not necessary in our world, a world where man versus man, in war and conflict (a symptom of which is violence) is all that matters. The only thing of import, to a divine extent, is that one man can or cannot beat the next. Which is why Judge Holden says: War Is God. Also, the middle third of the novel is a purgatorial, torturous journey through the desert. It is a tough read. Even I lost interest there- and this is my favourite novel. But you have to push through. The first third, and the last third of this novel are incredible, and justify the nightmarishly long middle. I totally disagree with you Jon; but I sympathise. It's one of those novels that on a first, surface-level read seems pretty unecessary. But it's also one of those novels that, if you do the tiniest bit of digging into the theory behind it, you'll turn up solid gold two inches down. Check out John Emil Sepich's book "Notes On" about it. It's revelatory. (For example, Judge Holden was a real person! Who is described in a witness account exactly as he is in this book!) Yeah, I just wrote a dissertation on this thing.
Agreed, i was so disappointed after all the hype i have heard. NCFOM was a very good book, this was just boring.
Blood Meridian is overwhelming, the prose stark and arcane, the characters mostly poppets for the murder that takes place in it. The sentence you quote, and the scene it comes from, is one of my favorite parts of the book. The Apaches swarming down on the Glanton Gang seemingly out of nowhere. You could break it up and add some periods here and there--but then the sense of crush and the swarming of the Apaches would be lost. It's a damn difficult book and to be honest, I was kind of swimming from around page 100 to the ending passages--it becomes a wash of landscape and murder--but that's largely the point. The book is basically a study of the grinding, mind-boggling remorselessness of the 'settling' of the West.
Well, I think most people will agree with Shedlock, this was "a tough read" I still liked it. I had 2 favorite parts. The first was when the judge made the black powder and saved all of them. The second was when the kid drew the short straw and couldn't do it. I wished the end was the opposite but I knew that would never pass! I also want to thank Dave Lee for his comment. I may be an idiot but we all die, eventually.
Good article although I can't agree, one of the most brutal, shocking books I've ever read. Terrible sentence to pick as an example though, a bit like saying 'I hate the Beatles', then playing 'Tomorrow Never Knows' as the reason why. If anyone who hasn't read the book isn't the least bit intrigued after reading that sentence I'd be amazed.
I agree wholeheartedly with Fabian. "I'm just gonna throw everything in there cause I'm that fucking special." Yup.
Dang it! I omitted the most important part of Fabian's remark: "Well You're not dude, I know it's been thirty years but you need to go back and edit all the fluffy shit out of this 'masterpiece'' and then it might actually be as good as everyone says it is." I also very much appreciated your appraisal of BM, Mr. Cronshaw! Thanks.
The author of this article deserves top be scalped!
This whole article is a troll attempt to summon Judge Holden.
I realized this review was a waste of time once it became apparent that the reviewer believes the kid is from Texas. He's a Kentuckian, which us significant not only in the context of the book but also in the greater context of McCarthy's work up to that point. As it turned out, further reading proved the article to be evidence of a complete misunderstanding of the subject. (The kid spent forty-odd days on a riverboat going...where? Cancun?) Hopefully the author used a pseudonym.
Since first reading Blood Meridian ten years ago I've read it at least a half-dozen times and it gets better with each visit, but it still can't match Suttree, my favourite McCarthy novel.
Since first reading it ten years ago I've read Blood Meridian at least a half-dozen times, but, as good as it is, it's nowhere near as good as my favourite McCarthy novel, Suttree.
Bullshit. That 245 word sentence is one of the most evocative I have ever read. I saw that heathen horde bearing down upon me and shat my pants. And I wasn't even high.
Well written, good-hearted review, though I disagree with you like crazy. First, I think it's appalling that you, kind of, claim to know how a book should be written. Not overly long sentences, not too distant, and not too violent. Second point you make is almost correct, because I agree that there are sentences (thoug only a few) that come close to muscle-flexing, but you 'prove' that point by quoting possibly the best sentence in the whole book, and the best proof that long sentences can work. You had your proof making a point against yours. But the thing that really got me going was the claim that it wasn't well written. I read it, then read it again, then read it again, then let Google Translate make something of it (being Dutch i thought my english isn't that bad, but you try what you can) and then read it again. I mean, seriously? And at the end we agree, that there's no-one around who is better at describing the landscape in which the story takes place. But on the whole, nice article (more an opinion-piece than a review i think, for its non-conformist 'look at me being the only one disagreeing with you all'-title and content. I only wish it would make more sense.
