This book was discovered during pregnancy in my local WHSmiths. I used to go there as a little child and pick out some new gel pens as a weekend treat. Yes, I love my stationery. My children I teach will tell you that! I have a special drawer with stationery treats in for star of the week presents. I have a special box with my stationery in that they can’t touch and I have my classroom stationery box that they can explore and use. Anyway, I’ve gone off piste. I could talk pens all day. But I’m here to talk Blood Meridian.
I picked it up because McCarthy’s The Road is taught in the A-Level Dystopian module. We compared The Road with The Handmaid’s Tale (when it was on the cusp of going big). The Road has a sparseness to it like Blood Meridian. Like HT, BM was published in 1985.
From the start, I was enthralled with McCarthy’s exceptional descriptive writing. The way he describes landscape is like nothing I’ve ever read: simplistic in lexis but detailed in syntax. He uses plenty of syndetic listing to create the endless vastness of America. Set in the mid 1850s, it’s about a nihilistic set of men who proceed to travel to America slaughtering Native Americans and collecting their scalps. Brutal? Yes. Intriguing? Yes. Shocking? Yes. It really did have it all. And I agree with the idea that it’s an epic western. The empty desert land is still lingering in my mind. The beauty of being alone but also the devastating brutality that these men lived by. They believed that ‘war is god’. They lived for killing. It’s in their blood.
What is most memorable is not the brutality though, it’s the way that the men always ‘rode on’. Whatever traumatic event that happened, they kept riding on. If their horses failed them, they walked on. Walked on until the brink of death and some would find a way to carry on. Even though their surroundings were of the extreme, I will take from this novel about how to keep on going despite setbacks. There is always someone ahead and always someone behind. Rest and recover but keep moving. Keep riding on.
This novel was hard to keep going at times because I’ve never read anything so murderous. It lacked in emotional feeling due to the third person omniscient narrator. In a way, I liked the distant relation with the characters because, as a reader, I was able to fill in the gaps. It allowed me to contribute. It gave the reader a sense of belonging within the book. Sometimes, we’re used to being fed so much emotion in novels. Sometimes, we need distance. Maybe McCarthy wasn’t able to contact the inner workings of these men as they were so distant from his own experience. Maybe no one really knows what it’s like to be a killer apart from the killer themselves.
Strangely, I’ve enjoyed reading this throughout the Covid-19 pandemic as it’s made me realise that the world has been a lot worse and right now, we’re not actually doing that badly. Thank goodness I’m not in the Elizabethan times and chucking my husband’s excrement out on the road. It could be worse.
At the start of the novel was an introduction. It talked about it all epic stories and the journey of man from what I remember. My next novel: Homer, The Odyssey. Because that’s the greatest tale of a journey. Wish me luck as I enter the Greek world. We tackled Ovid at Uni and a few other epic tales but I was young then and cared more for nightclubs and modern poetry than mythology. Now, I want to be encompassed by them.
I picked it up because McCarthy’s The Road is taught in the A-Level Dystopian module. We compared The Road with The Handmaid’s Tale (when it was on the cusp of going big). The Road has a sparseness to it like Blood Meridian. Like HT, BM was published in 1985.
From the start, I was enthralled with McCarthy’s exceptional descriptive writing. The way he describes landscape is like nothing I’ve ever read: simplistic in lexis but detailed in syntax. He uses plenty of syndetic listing to create the endless vastness of America. Set in the mid 1850s, it’s about a nihilistic set of men who proceed to travel to America slaughtering Native Americans and collecting their scalps. Brutal? Yes. Intriguing? Yes. Shocking? Yes. It really did have it all. And I agree with the idea that it’s an epic western. The empty desert land is still lingering in my mind. The beauty of being alone but also the devastating brutality that these men lived by. They believed that ‘war is god’. They lived for killing. It’s in their blood.
What is most memorable is not the brutality though, it’s the way that the men always ‘rode on’. Whatever traumatic event that happened, they kept riding on. If their horses failed them, they walked on. Walked on until the brink of death and some would find a way to carry on. Even though their surroundings were of the extreme, I will take from this novel about how to keep on going despite setbacks. There is always someone ahead and always someone behind. Rest and recover but keep moving. Keep riding on.
This novel was hard to keep going at times because I’ve never read anything so murderous. It lacked in emotional feeling due to the third person omniscient narrator. In a way, I liked the distant relation with the characters because, as a reader, I was able to fill in the gaps. It allowed me to contribute. It gave the reader a sense of belonging within the book. Sometimes, we’re used to being fed so much emotion in novels. Sometimes, we need distance. Maybe McCarthy wasn’t able to contact the inner workings of these men as they were so distant from his own experience. Maybe no one really knows what it’s like to be a killer apart from the killer themselves.
Strangely, I’ve enjoyed reading this throughout the Covid-19 pandemic as it’s made me realise that the world has been a lot worse and right now, we’re not actually doing that badly. Thank goodness I’m not in the Elizabethan times and chucking my husband’s excrement out on the road. It could be worse.
At the start of the novel was an introduction. It talked about it all epic stories and the journey of man from what I remember. My next novel: Homer, The Odyssey. Because that’s the greatest tale of a journey. Wish me luck as I enter the Greek world. We tackled Ovid at Uni and a few other epic tales but I was young then and cared more for nightclubs and modern poetry than mythology. Now, I want to be encompassed by them.
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