Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy – Reviewed by Guy Portman
‘The Kid’ is a fourteen-year-old hailing from a Tennessean backwater. Following an ill-fated stint as a conscript in a Mexico-bound militia, he is commissioned to collect Indian scalps. We follow ‘The Kid’ and his companions’ fortunes. The amoral bunch include their de facto leader ‘The Judge’, an educated, philosophising hairless giant.
The text is replete with true depravity, entailing murderous rampages, necrophilia, infanticide and all manner of debauchery. One particularly horrific scene sees an attack by a troop of rampaging Comanche, dressed in the bloodied clothes of their male and female victims.
Set in the 1800’s, Blood Meridian is an episodic book, which is almost unparalleled in its misanthropy and repugnant content. This is a nightmarish world populated by morally void characters, where wigless corpses abound.
The prose is elegant, at times poetic. Idiosyncrasies include an absence of speech marks, a hallmark of McCarthy’s writing. This does on occasion make the going onerous, as does the author’s obsession with archaic terms. However, these minor objections do not ultimately detract much from what is an exceptional work, and surely one of the bleakest novels ever penned.
