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Rating: The goal is to survive. The ultimate goal is to reach the end of the book still sane and realize that everything is over and at least we are safe. It is indeed difficult to navigate through the pages of Cormac McCarthy, not so much for the language used, which is almost always smooth, but for the scenes his pen manages to evoke, scenes at the limit, often intentionally pushed to the extreme...
Blood Meridian is the fifth novel published by McCarthy: it is 1985 and the echo of "Suttree" is still alive in the minds of those who have had the fortune to read it. A full six years of literary darkness in which Cormac McCarthy continued to live in the sought and wanted solitude of the town of El Paso, on the border between the United States and Mexico: a place the American writer chose for two main reasons. The first concerns its geographical location that makes El Paso a city where literary salons and publishing merchandise cannot reach: this distance from "advertising" is what McCarthy has always sought, being shy, solitary. "I say everything in the books" is one of McCarthy's most famous phrases, almost apologizing to those who cannot approach him for interviews and various things. The second reason he chose El Paso is the landscape, the forgotten and unchanging one that he tells in his books, a real added character of a detached and almost unreal world. His Nature kills, tears apart, makes suffer, and takes away hope.
Blood Meridian is the story of a boy hired by a band of scalp hunters, where two main figures emerge: that of Glanton, a violent leader devoid of any moral scruples, and Judge Holden, a huge, hairless man and lover of culture, nature, and everything that can be known by the human mind. His character seems like a strange desert philosopher to whom God has given particular oratory skills. "Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player is that moment’s hesitation that tells him whether it is to be his opponent or that he shall die by the hand of the other. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? The move to the extreme condition of the game lays bare the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is absolute and irrevocable, and it is the obtuse among us that choose a decision invested so utterly, sans design or agent of understanding, or of purpose. In such a game the lost man is removed from existential being. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the test of one’s will and the will of another within that will which is forced to come to terms because they are tied together. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is God."
But Cormac McCarthy's pages are not just those in which Judge Holden indulges in pseudo-philosophical musings about the different realities of creation; they are also the violent and bloody ones in which the band of derelicts that monopolizes the entire book moves. These are the brutal pages of an author who looks nostalgically at that past. Here the reader must gather courage and venture into this "new universe" where guts, whores, entrails, guns, massacres, alcohol, dust, sand, sun, feces, blood, scalps, wounds, urine, cut ears, shattered skulls, diseases, deformities, and cruelty exist at unimaginable levels, sometimes too disturbing. It is the sick reality of Cormac McCarthy, contrasted with an impassive Nature, also violent but at the same time monumental and in some way even "friendly" to travelers. In this sense follow breathtaking pages of night rides, the placid arrival of dawn, the muffled sound of the wind raising the red sand of the desert. It is in the lengthy descriptions of the landscape that McCarthy does his best, giving us a violent but thrilling book like few others, capable of truly transporting you to another world where silence dominates over lost things and the absolute majesty of the desert...
"To the west, the sun sets in a holocaust from which rises a continuous column of small desert bats, and to the north, along the shimmering rim of the world, dust blows into the void like smoke from distant armies. The mountains of crumpled butcher paper lay with angled shadows across the long blue twilight, and midway the glassy bed of a dry lake gleams like the sea of imbrium, and packs of deer move toward the north in the world's final hour, pursued across the plain by wolves the same color as the desert."
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