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.

All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award


Cormac McCarthy is one of the most interesting novelists working today.  I laid out some thoughts on his writing in my review of The Road, but I think I sold him a bit short.  This is what I wrote:

McCarthy has stated in interviews that he doesn't think much of literature that doesn't "deal with matters of life and death."  I disagree with him on this front; once we move past concerns of life and death, we can engage what Faulkner called "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."  My issue with The Road, and with McCarthy in general, is that he doesn't take us there.

Having just finished my fourth McCarthy novel now, All the Pretty Horses, I realize that I was wrong.  McCarthy is dealing with many of the same themes and issues as the other great writers, but he's coming at things from a different angle.  To McCarthy, talk is cheap, and thoughts are even cheaper; it's action that reveals character.  He's not always going to spell out what going's on in the characters' heads, but their actions open a window to their minds and souls.


The question of fate looms large in All the Pretty Horses.  The novel is open to the idea of a Christian God who controls the destiny of His subjects.  This is laid out early in an exchange between John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins.  Cole suggests that if Rawlins' parents hadn't met, he never would have been born.

Rawlins lay watching the stars.  After a while he said: I could still be born.  I might look different or somethin.  If God wanted me to be born I'd be born.

And if He didnt you wouldnt. 

Fate, God, and destiny show up repeatedly in the story.  Blevins is petrified he will be killed by lightning because his family members were all killed by lightning.  Cole himself is a born horseman, who "if were begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway."  Alejandra's aunt notes the trouble her families women has with men and hopes it's not "tainted blood" or "a family curse."  When Cole returns to the ranch towards the end of the story, the workers tell him "that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other."  However, Cole later tells Rawlins that America, his land of birth, "ain't my country."  There is a capriciousness to birthrights.


Fate is a major topic in a conversation between Cole and Alejandra's aunt after he is released from prison.  She makes the analogy to

A tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz.

She suggests in the next breath a "puppet show" where the puppet strings "terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on."  All the Pretty Horses is open to the idea of a Christian God, but it doesn't matter.  Because if God exists, His will is virtually indistinguishable from nihilistic randomness.  And ultimately, how can we know if something was fated to happen, or whether it just happened to happen?  The aunt makes this point also:

In history there are no control groups.  There is no one to tell us what might have been.  We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been.  There never was. 

The closest McCarthy gets to laying out some sort of theory, some method to God's madness, is Cole's thought that pain exists as some sort of currency to create beauty.  "The blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."  It's not clear whether this is a blessing or a curse; Rawlins says early on in the novel that a good-looking horse or woman is "always more trouble than what they're worth."


How is a person to act in a world where he does not have control over his destiny?  The book makes two suggestions.  The first is acceptance.  Cole's mother leaves his father and he cannot keep the farm, but he bears this pain without fighting back, even accepting the divorce.  The judge who exonerates Cole near the very end of the tale is another model of acceptance.  He tells Cole that "I sure didnt want to be a judge," but ultimately ends up taking on that role out of duty to his country.  "I think I just didnt have any choice.  Just didnt have any choice," he says.


The other option is raging against destiny.  Alejandra's aunt describes wanting "very much to be a person of value" when she was younger.  "If one were to be a person of value that value could not  be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune.  It had to be a quality that could not change.  No matter what."  Cole subscribes to this philosophy.  Later in the book he tells the judge that his greatest regret is not attempting to intercede when Blevins was killed.  The judge asks him "Would it have done any good?"  He replies, "No sir.  But that dont make it right."  Very early on, McCarthy tells us that "all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise," in a rare instance of the narrative voice telling and not showing.  In a way, All the Pretty Horses mirrors the Book of Job, except unlike Job, Cole does not humbly accept his suffering and trust in God's plan.


There are no easy answers.  Cole's father wastes away, "thin and frail," with "sunken eyes."  Blevins, takes great pains to avoid death by lightning but in doing so sets off a chain of events that results in his death.  Alejandra's aunt tries to set up a better life for Alejandra, but it is unclear whether her machinations will be successful.  Cole's quest to find Blevins' horse's rightful owner, and with it possible absolution in the eyes of Alejandra's family, fails.  So is man to accept his fate, or rage against it?  McCarthy leaves both doors open, but behind each is suffering and death.

The Road

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2010
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize

The Road is the story of a father and son, surviving together on a doomed post-apocalyptic Earth against the elements, starvation, and rampaging hoards of cannibals.  Death is an inevitability, not just on an individual level but for the human species.  The air, sea, and land is drained of color and replaced with a lifeless gray.  Of the three Cormac McCarthy books I've read, The Road is by far the most optimistic.

The protagonists are an unnamed man and his son, who travel alone through a ruined America.  There is no chance that the boy will grow up to live a normal life, the kind of life the man had before whatever terrible event or series of events left the world so desolate, but they press on anyways.  They flee from death, though they recognize some fates - like being captured by the cannibals - are worse than death.  They take brief joy in simple pleasures like finding good shelter for a few days, or a can of Coca Cola.  Most significantly, the man impresses upon the boy that there is a right and a wrong, and that he cannot compromise his humanity in the effort to survive.  This is the real struggle of The Road - not survival, but maintaining some sort of moral code in a world where society has collapsed.

That said, it is a stark book.  That's undoubtedly by design, but it can make it hard to read; every few pages the major characters get in a dire situation - starvation, disease, marauders - manage to survive, only to be plunged into another life-threatening circumstance a few pages later.  McCarthy has stated in interviews that he doesn't think much of literature that doesn't "deal with matters of life and death."  I disagree with him on this front; once we move past concerns of life and death, we can engage what Faulkner called "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."  My issue with The Road, and with McCarthy in general, is that he doesn't take us there.  He has no intention of taking us there.  The struggle for basic human decency underlies the novel, but McCarthy rarely lets you inside his character's heads, so the feelings underlying the actions of the characters and their reactions to what they see are largely a matter of the reader's supposition.  

No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2010
Guardian 1000 Novels

I could not disagree more with Cormac McCarthy's world view.  I've read three of his novels, and each is a dive into the worst that humanity has to offer: violence, cruelty, murder, and an almost casual psychopathology.  This is epitomized in No Country for Old Men's villain Anton Chigurh, who thinks nothing of killing innocent people.  He accepts no higher power but chance, and frequently flips a coin to decide whether others will live or die.  Bizarrely, he has an ethical code, going to great lengths to honor his word, and abiding by the results of the coin flip.  This only makes him more frightening and sinister; his ethics are in the service of nothing.  He is an apex predator in a completely nihilistic world.

What makes No Country for Old Men (and McCarthy's other books) so disturbing is that Chigurh is not seen as an aberration; he's seen as the herald of a new kind of man, a new breed that will define the future of humanity.  Humanity is always on the downswing in McCarthy's works.  The worst elements among us will prevail in a dark future with no room for innocence, mercy, love, or hope.

I don't agree with any of that ... but McCarthy is a heck of a writer, and No Country for Old Men is a gripping read.