Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)

Blood Meridian follows 'the boy' through various terrors and hardships, mostly in the 1850s Mexico/American West. He falls in with a small gang of men who get paid to protect villages from Indians; they get paid based on the scalps they bring in. Sometimes the gang does scalp the intended targets; other times, they massacre innocent villages. They meander through this region committing various atrocities until the boy eventually finds his way to California and elsewhere, eking out a more honest living even as he remains among the scum and villainy. 

On style: this was my first Cormac McCarthy book. I didn't care for it much. It was unusual and hard to follow. He seldom uses any punctuation outside of periods and the occasional comma (dialogue, which is rare, isn't in quotes). Some chapters have breathtaking run-on sentences. Sometimes he switches to Spanish for a few sentences without translating. He rarely uses names (sometimes you learn of them only as a character is dying). It is mostly a series of declarative statements of events, though he does 'sidebar' into lengthy descriptions of weather and terrain. His vocabulary is impressive. I appreciate that he is a talented writer; I just didn't appreciate his style. 

On subject: McCarthy paints a poignant portrait of a terrible time. The desert is harsh and unyielding; its inhabitants the same. The violence is portrayed without regret or compassion; the nonchalance of the main characters reveals that they know nothing different. They just exist and go on. The point of the work appears to be stated near the end, where 'the judge,' a most intriguing character, tells the boy (now in his thirties) that life is "a solitary game, without opponent . . . you of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the empitness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not?" And looking around the room of a typical western saloon, he goes on as he picks a man at random, claiming that "his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all." McCarthy rightly diagnoses the human condition—for that I commend him—but he paints a picture without hope. 

Rating: C