Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A difficult book to digest on the first reading.
The sanguinous and gory essence of the book and its title is validated by the following passages

The murdered lay in a great pool of their communal blood. It had set up into a sort of pudding crossed everywhere with the tracks of wolves or dogs and along the edges it had dried and cracked into a burgundy ceramic. Blood lay in dark tongues vestibule where the stones were cupped from the feet of the faithful and their father before them and it had threaded its way down into the steps and dripped from the stones among the dark red tracks of the scavengers.

…one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Galnton’s warhorse.

They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the colas where the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.

Eww! But the vivid lyrical descriptions make the narrative a delight

Gold seekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like so heliotropic plague.

The advent of the riders bruited by scurvid curs that howled woundedly and slank among the crumbling walls.

All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker…
Lightening shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning rang like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal of the harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of the guns.

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely any space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their number are no less.

Sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urine-coloured sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature.

… all tattooed, branded, sutured, and the great puckered scars inaugurated God knows where by what barbarous surgeons across chests and abdomens like the tracks of gigantic millipedes, some deformed, fingers missing, eyes, their foreheads and arms stamped with letters and numbers as if they were articles requiring inventory.

Each man scanned the terrain and movements of the least of creatures were logged into their collective cognizance until they were federated with invisible wires or vigilance and advanced upon the at landscape with a single resonance.

Philosophical existentialism that require repeated readings to comprehend

Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with she same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

… while someone asked the expriest if it were true that at one time there had been two moons in the sky and the expriest eyed the false moon above them and said that it may well have been so. But certainly the wise high God in his dismay at the proliferation of lunacy o this earth must have wetted a thumb and leaned down out of the abyss and pinched it hissing into extinction.

… The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddled field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Requires to be reread to be fully savoured.

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