Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Official Review: ⭐⭐⭐

This one is tough for me.

I want to start by saying that going into my first read of Blood Meridian, I really wanted to like it. I wanted to with an open mind, aware of the things that were already said about it, and completely and utterly willing to deal with any of those flaws to read and analyze a novel that many people consider to be one of the greatest in all of American literature.

Anyone who has ever read this book would tell you that it is wordy, dense, and sometimes features long paragraphs that require reading and re-reading to make sense of. I saw that, obviously. But to be honest, the language wasn’t what was off-putting for me. If that was the only flaw I had with it, I certainly wouldn’t be giving it three stars.

I’m a sucker for plot and character. My last review, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, was one of the deepest character studies I had ever read. Then, I moved into Blood Meridian, and felt little to no connection with any of the characters at all.

Even Judge Holden, who has been described as “perhaps the most haunting character in American literature”, really didn’t do much for me. The kid, who functions as a protagonist even though he’s relatively absent for most of the novel, didn’t do much for me. The plot, of which there is very little, didn’t do much for me.

I saw Blood Meridian as this…. The party rides out. They attack some natives. They do gruesome and brutal things to them, like when two babies are swung by their legs and their skulls are smashed together, and then they ride out again. The Judge says some weird stuff and gives a long speech about about how “war is god” or something else philosophical, and then they ride out again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Mix in a few conversations written entirely in Spanish, and vivid descriptions of the desert, and you’ve got the novel as I viewed it.

My favorite chapter of them all has to be the simplest. The kid sits by the fire with the old priest, who tells him about how the party came across the Judge. He was sitting on a rock in the middle of the desert, completely naked, almost as if he was waiting for them. He knows they are in trouble, fashions gunpowder out of stuff they find in the desert, and then takes on the role of Glanton’s second in command.

I loved that chapter because it had dialogue, it moved the plot forward, and I learned more about the characters and their motivations. So few chapters did this for me. It was just description, description, brutal violence, philosophical musings, description, description.

I know this was an intentional choice. There’s so little dialogue in this book, as McCarthy chooses instead to immerse you in the text with long passages that describe the setting or what the characters are doing. There’s so little character development, dialogue, and moments like the kid and the priest talking over the fire, that I just didn’t enjoy it.

That’s okay. Not every book is for everybody.