So I finished Blood Meridian over the break. I have decidedly mixed feelings about it. Spoilers follow.
Some parts were great, some parts were incredibly heavy-handed, sometimes at the same time. The bit with the Judge making gun powder was cool, for instance, but it played into the heavy-handedness of his devilishness. I have no problem with Satanic characters; I've read and enjoyed a good deal of Gothic fiction. But in this case I thought that the evil would have been much more effective if it were more grounded. Making him a Satanic character without making him actually Satan, preserving some sense of realism. The Judge was absurd.
That said, I liked his monologues. Those were some of the most entertaining and well written parts of the book. McCarthy's dialogue in general is pretty good. My problems were mostly in the details (which is, after all, where the devil is).
The tense shifts were mostly confined to the first few chapters, which probably contributed heavily to my negative first impression of the book. The first chapter, in particular, is among the most heavy handed in the book. Still, the tense shifts never quite stop, and by and large they're unnecessary: signs that McCarthy doesn't quite trust his readers. For instance, the first time that the Judge is sketching in his book, the tense shifts mid-paragraph from past into present to tell the reader that "He is a draftsman as he is other things, well sufficiant to the task. He looks up from time to time at the fire or at his companions in arms or at the night beyond." Get it? He's the devil, so he's still alive in the present, and the fire is the fire of Hell and his companions in arms are the demons of Hell, and the night beyond is outer darkness. And it pulls me right out of the moment. It would have been much stronger, in my opinion, to keep it in the past tense, subtler, let the attentive reader catch the Satanic undertones without turning the amps up to 11. Which is also my problem with the last proper chapter of the book, but I'll get to that in a moment.
As mentioned earlier, I didn't think that McCarthy's word choices were always appropriate. I don't mind an obscure word as long as it's the right obscure word. Something that might have been used in the context of the story or something that at least has some relation to the context. Words used once or twice in 16th Century England don't really fall into this category.
What I liked most about the book: the parts that had to do with the Kid (first chapter excluded). Unfortunately he drops out almost completely for about a hundred pages in the middle. This seems like a misstep, to me, since the point of his story seems to be that he was different than the other people in Glanton's band. But we don't get him being different. We get him staring at the Judge and the Judge staring at him. And once we get him pulling an arrow out of someone's leg when no one else will do it, which seems to be his first real act of compassion. So yeah, the middle of the book didn't do much for me. Lots of flat description of traveling (oh, this time they're passing a group of dwarf cedars, last time it was acacias, before that scrub oaks, how interesting), punctuated by some nicely described bits of violence, which, for all the nice description, start to get a bit redundant and boring after a while. The book picked up for me once the kid gets left behind to kill one of the injured men, which he doesn't do (his second compassionate action, or inaction, though we still haven't seen him show any scruple about what Glanton's band is doing in general). The chase with the Judge was nice. But the ending with the Judge naked in the outhouse and then dancing naked in the tavern while someone played the fiddle? We're back in Spinal Tap territory. I mean, it was good through the part where he sees the Judge and tells him that he ain't nothin. I like that. And I wouldn't mind the Judge killing him if there had been a bit of realism to it. But I almost laughed aloud at that last paragraph. I can hardly believe that something so heavy handed can be regarded so highly. There were certainly some great stretches in this book, and even some great prose, but in the end I'd say it's hopelessly uneven. I'm not sorry I read it, even though I mostly did so out of a feeling of obligation as a writer and a lit grad student. But it's not something I see myself reading again, and it's not something I'd recommend to most of my friends. If I had to rate it on some scale, I'd probably give it about a 7 out of 10. |
