Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
read: circa 2010
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

Cormac McCarthy says he doesn't like magic realism:

You're somewhat constrained in writing a novel, I think. Like, I'm not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.

This makes the character of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian puzzling, or maybe terrifying.  Holden is the most sadistic and ruthless member of a sadistic and ruthless band of scalp-hunters riding across Mexico killing Indians.  He is also the most learned, the most well-spoken, and the most ingenious.  Holden appeared in the desert to the group to aid them in making gunpowder and killing enemies, but each member also had a prior encounter with the judge as he roamed throughout North American sowing chaos and evil.  He is not explicitly superhuman, but as a character he has a mythical presence. This isn't Anton Chigurh, who acknowledges (and is ultimately undone by) the pivotal role of chance and fate in our lives; Holden is beyond such things: "He says that he will never die."

Professor Amy Hungerford of Yale talks about the various allusions present in Blood Meridian - to the Bible, to Moby Dick, to Paradise Lost, to a poem of Wordsworth's - but while McCarthy's words hearken back to those other works, the spirit is different.  Blood Meridian's protagonist (known only as "the kid") does not have the glib humor of Ishmael and there's little of the moral authority found in the Bible.  And while the story structure evokes the bildungsroman and the Western, it ultimately subverts them.  The kid becomes the man, but he never becomes a hero.  His acts of mercy are not good, but weak - in fact, his inability to shoot and kill Judge Holden may be his greatest sin of all.

Blood Meridian pulls from these works and these worlds, but the message throughout the novel seems to be: those original stories were missing something.  They pulled punches.  They were naive.  Because the truth is worse, so much worse.  Evil is everywhere; it is inherent in man, and has been since the beginning.  And it, like Judge Holden, will never die.  None of McCarthy's works have a positive outlook, but Blood Meridian's bleakness feels particularly timeless and profound.