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The story takes place in the American Southwest in the wake of the Mexican-American War (April 1846–February 1848), during one of the most brutal periods in American history. It's a Darwinian struggle among American gringos, Mexicans and Native Indians in an attempt to destroy each other. All moral bets are off. Savagery prevails.

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The violence in the book against Native Americans and Mexicans is based on the activities of a real gang, led by a Texas Ranger who fought in the war for Texas independence, then became a soldier of fortune in the mid-19th century American Southwest. We can recognize where the racist mentality that prevails today comes from.

Meanwhile, The Judge is the kind of violent, nihilistic character who would not be out of place in a Dostoevsky novel or, maybe because of his philosophizing, closer to Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness.

The über-gifted Judge also reminded me of Milton's Lucifer. (I finally got around to reading Paradise Lost last year).

And I'm sure it's not a coincidence that McCarthy has the ex-priest character, Tobin, be the one who admires the Judge the most and describes him as a fortunate recipient of "the gifts of the Almighty."

About 35% into the novel Tobin, the ex-priest, takes over as narrator for a bit and provides some backstory of what happened previously. Tobin's account of first encountering the Judge has a numinous feel to it....

'Then about the meridian of that day we come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self. Aye and there was no rock, just the one. Irving said he’d brung it with him. I said that it was a merestone for to mark him out of nothing at all. He had with him that selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german silver and the name that he’d give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin: Et In Arcadia Ego. A reference to the lethal in it. Common enough for a man to name his gun. I’ve heard Sweetlips and Hark From The Tombs and every sort of lady’s name. His is the first and only ever I seen with an inscription from the classics.

And there he set. No horse. Just him and his legs crossed, smilin as we rode up. Like he’d been expectin us. He’d an old canvas kitbag and an old woolen benjamin over the one shoulder. In the bag was a brace of pistols and a good assortment of specie, gold and silver. He didnt even have a canteen.'

Shades of Milton's Lucifer.....

High on a hill, far blazing, as a mount
Raised on a mount, with pyramids and towers
From diamond quarries hewn, and rocks of gold;
The palace of great Lucifer, (so call
That structure in the dialect of men
Interpreted,) which not long after, he
Affecting all equality with God,
In imitation of that mount whereon
Messiah was declared in sight of Heaven,
The Mountain of the Congregation called;
For thither he assembled all his train,
Pretending so commanded to consult
About the great reception of their King,
Thither to come, and with calumnious art
Of counterfeited truth thus held their ears.

Paradise Lost, Book V, lines 758-771

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Some of McCarthy's prose...

Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite.

They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark.

up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles.

all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke.

At the same time, I have to acknowledge McCarthy's overuse of what one critic calls andelopes: "a breathless string of simple declarative statements linked by the conjunction "and." These don't always work and the reader can end up confused or reduced to skimming.

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Cormac McCarthy, RIP, age 89

It took McCarthy a decade to write 'Blood Meridian' Critics were divided. The book sold fewer than 2,000 copies, and most of the first edition was remaindered. It took a decade or so for readers to appreciate his book. It depicts a struggle between fate and free will and the inevitability of death.

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Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian....



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Excellent interview with Cormac McCarthy, with loads of insights.....



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my review of Paradise Lost....

/review/show...