Just finished Cormac McCarthy’s novel
‘Blood Meridian,’ which is about a boy with
a taste for ‘mindless violence’ who joins
a gang of Americans in Mexico scalping
Indians for money. The Indians, Apaches
mostly, are worse than the Americans.
The novel is the most violent thing I’ve
ever read, murder and mayhem visited
willy nilly on women, children, babies, and animals,
and there is one member of
the gang, the Judge, who is pretty
plainly Satan.
The writing is extraordinarily good and the description
of the natural world in which these people are
wandering is simply stunningly beautiful.
Finally it seems a meditation on evil, much like
Moby Dick set in the 1850s west.
Apparently it will appear as a movie in
2009, Ridley Scott directing, though how it
can be filmed is beyond me.
BTW, thanks to the movie that out, it’s hard to find McCarthy books in the library. At least here it is. No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian are out and have a waiting list.
I’ve read the first two books of the Border Trilogy.
The second one, The Crossing, seemed weak.
Never gelled into a central story–there’s a first
part with a wolf and a second part without
a wolf and nothing much to unify.
As to the last book of the trilogy,
sorry I can’t remember the name,
what do people think of it?
All The Pretty Horses, brilliant. Can one really enjoy a Cormac McCarthy book? I thought the Road was one of the best books written in the past decade, yet I can’t really recommend it to anyone. It’s too damn depressing. Still, it’s good. . . hmmmm.
I thought All the Pretty Horses was the best. Agree that The Crossing was relatively weak. The last book, Cities of the Plain I found more satisfying than the The Crossing. I’m really glad I read all 3.
I’ve posted elsewhere on the forum that The Road was the occasion of a really strange reading experience for me. It’s beautiful, and, you know, depressing somehow doesn’t capture it. It’s, uh, despair-inducing.
I can say, however, that I enjoyed No Country for Old Men, which I read this past summer. It’s bleak, of course–we’re talking McCarthy here–but a good read with some interesting characters. It’s probably his most accessible read.
Let’s say there was a nuclear winter scenario, something like in the book. Vegetation will die out, animal life will die out, humans survive a bit longer because of stored food, but are doomed to die out.
Suppose that there’s a hope for preserving a small “breeding stock” of humans long enough to get some clearing in the atmosphere, maybe start up some agriculture. In order to have this hope, you have to have a some survivors, you have to keep some livestock alive, you have to hang on to some seeds or something. You have to get that “lifeboat” through the nuclear winter.
That means a smallish community of organized people would have to accumulate the food and livestock and other materials–would have to take those and guard them. The smallish community would have to take those from the larger body of survivors. Most people would have to die in order for the small survival community to be able to get through the nuclear winter period.
So, imagine that military types, for example, meet and look at options. They know that if they do nothing, the vegetation dies, the animals die, and then the people die because there’s no hope for producing food in the short run (many years). The alternative: take control of the remaining provisions so the lifeboat group will live, even though you know that everybody else dies sooner than they would. You expedite their extinction to allow a small group to survive. Else, NOBODY survives.
So, the moral question would become, does the entire human race die out, or do you do what has to be done to allow for the possibility of the human race to survive?
Scenario 1: Everybody dies out slowly and miserably.
Scenario 2: Most every one dies out, a bit quicker, so that there’s some hope for the species.
Of course, it’s the weird genius of the book that I’ve spent time thinking about this.
Hello Jim, I have read all but his last book. I find Blood Meridian a work of genius. None have I found to be an easy read. Some are more accessible than others such as All the Pretty Horses
A good film rendition of Blood Meridian I believe would be quite a challenge, even to Ridley Scott. My daughter is a hard core McCarthy fan and thinks it unfilmable. I’m on my fourth read; each reread I pick up more nuance and just plain realize more. Great author.
Dale, you left out a third option. Consider the likelihood that the only people preserved will be politicians of one sort or another. Then there is no reason to save the species.