Blood Meridian/The Road

I almost hesitate to embark upon a comparison of Blood Meridian and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, because they are both powerful books and I know there are legions of McCarthy fans out there but I was so impressed by both that I'm going to give it a go.

I was led to Blood Meridian by Michael Ondaatje who listed it as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century. McCarthy is a powerful writer with an almost unparalleled facility for description of places that evoke not only physical presences, but moods and atmospheres as well. Blood Meridian at times feels like one long descriptive narrative. You can open the book on almost any page for an example, such as the following:

"They entered the city in a gauntlet of flung offal, driven like cattle through the cobbled streets with shouts going up behind for the soldiery who smiled as became them and nodded among the flowers and proffered cups, herding the tattered fortune-seekers through the plaza where the water splashed in a fountain and idlers reclined on carven seats of white porphyry and past the governor's palace and past the cathedral where vultures squatted along the dusty entablatures and among the niches in the carved facade hard by the figures of Christ and the apostles, the birds holding out their own dark vestments in postures of strange benevolence while about them flapped on the wind the dried scalps of slaughtered indians strung on cords, the long dull hair swinging like the filaments of certain seaforms and the dry hides clapping against the stones."

In The Road, the writing is sparse, pared to the bone, essential and yet equally powerful and perfectly reflecting the setting of the post-apocalyptic world:

"They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold rept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."

Blood Meridian starts with a fourteen year old boy who runs away from home in Tennessee and is recruited into a band of marauders working in and around the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s. The objective of the group is to hunt down and kill and scalp as many indians as possible and to receive payment from the Mexican authorities for the scalps. They kill indiscriminately: men, women and children, and they wipe out whole small villages of Mexicans as well, as the opportunity arises. Their world is unrelentingly Hobbesian: dark, dangerous, deadly, and without a shred of civilization in the sense of any care, or any passing thought for other bipedal creatures as possibly deserving even a scintilla of compassion. The concept does not exist in their world. They are:

"Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in times before nomenclature was and each was all."

The Road describes the journey of a nameless man and his son following the interstate highways, pushing a shopping cart with all their worldly belongings and food, trying to make their way to the coast to escape the freezing death of the north. It is a dark, very dark world; dark physically with everything burned and destroyed and looted, the sky perpetually grey, the land is ash, (the reason for this apocalypse is never made clear, although there is a hint of nuclear war, but it is not important), dark emotionally, dark intellectually, and a place of unimaginable dangers and horrors. McCarthy clearly believes that the veneer of civilization is thin and once torn or, in this case, completely destroyed the world is dark and dangerous and bestial. This was very much the world depicted in Blood Meridian, in quite a different setting, and although The Road shares that dark vision it is, at the same time, more hopeful, more optimistic through the lives of the man and his son and, in the end, the possibility that there still being people who do maintain a sense of community and decency despite the horrors about them.

In Blood Meridian, men live only for the moment, expect no future, relive no past, think very little if at all on the broader scheme of things, accept death and dole it out with the casualness of breathing:

"He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are ever given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them."

There are similar characters in The Road but they are seen peripherally and are not the principal focus of the novel although they loom large as terrifying and death-dealing entities. Unlike Blood Meridian, The Road is a tale of survival and hardship, and almost unbearable moments of fear, but underlying, a story of deep and true love between the man and his son, a concept, an emotion, an ethos that is quite absent from Blood Meridian. Throughout The Road, the man gives his son moral guidance and teaching, something the son hungers for, as shown by the son frequently seeking reassurance from his father that they are "the good guys", that they would not eat people no matter what their situation, and that they hold the "fire". The boy needs this to distinguish and define themselves and thus make some sense of who they are in their nightmare world. The "fire" is not defined, but when the boy asks where it is, the father replies, "It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it." The fire is the spark of goodness, of knowing how to live right and not on the pain and death of other people. Although the boy learns that decisions are not always cut and dried, and sometimes, in order to save themselves they have to be selfish, without fostering the discomfort or death of others. It is interesting to see the boy, on a couple of occasions, acting as the conscience for the father, bringing him back to the meaning of the "fire". There is no such conscience, nascent or otherwise, among the characters in Blood Meridian.

One character that stands out in the group in Blood Meridian is the "judge": learned in ways that set him well apart from his peers: a linguist, naturalist, geologist, historian, chemist, collector and describer of fauna and flora, astronomer...and yet, his interest in nature is to confine and control it, he is offended by the freedom and uncontrolled aspects of nature; he is a huge man of prodigious strength and despite his learning which one might consider the trappings of civilization, he is a murderous and amoral, or even more so, than any of the group. His philosophy of life summed up in the contention that, "Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak".

The denouement of Blood Meridian has the kid, one of the few survivors, now grown into a man, meeting again with the judge in what the judge clearly sees as a pre-ordained occurrence that seems to be the end for both of them. As such, it is entirely in keeping with the darkness of the whole story, although I found it enigmatic and difficult to figure out just what McCarthy was aiming at. Perhaps because I think the character of the judge makes sense if he is an incarnation of the Devil, and I need to re-read the book with that perspective in mind.

Although there is a moment of intense emotion towards the end of The Road it has an ultimate ending that some will complain is too optimistic, too convenient, and perhaps not in keeping with the mood of 99% of the book that preceded. I'm not sure I would agree. Even in the darkest of worlds, and it's hard to imagine one any darker than The Road, and while I subscribe to McCarthy's general view on the veneer of civilization, I still think there would be pockets of good people, those who would fight for the realization of the fire.

A final point. McCarthy is also a writer with a prodigious vocabulary, not just for local fauna, but more generally as well, and he sent me scurrying to the dictionary often, less so in The Road, but that's because the prose is so much leaner.

These two books demonstrate the protean nature of McCarthy's ability as writer. He is an artist and language is his palette. Anyone who has not read him is in for a treat.

Great review. Your selection of quotations is very good indeed. McCarthy sounds an extremely bleak writer. Are all his books so dark?

That is eye-opening to me. Many thanks.

Some would categorize McCarthy as bleak and violent and this is certainly more true of Blood Meridian than it is of The Road or All The Pretty Horses, the other McCarthy book that I have read. But, as a friend of mine put it concerning Blood Meridian, the book would simply not work in the hands of a lesser writer; with McCarthy you are really swept along by the power of his writing. There is really no redeeming light in Blood Meridian but there is a wealth of narrative and issues and ideas to consider. The Road has a very bleak setting (physically much darker than Blood Meridian), but this contrasts with the love and strength and goodness and even hope that you see in the relationship between the man and his son; and the relationship is dynamic with the man learning from his son. Also, while there is a lot of violence and blood in Blood Meridian (one reviewer on LT kept referring to the gore), in The Road the violence is more of a constant anticipation; what struck me in The Road was the visceral, gut-wrenching fear that McCarthy portrays so well. You can feel the hearts of the father and son pounding when they are almost caught by a group of killers/cannibals. All the Pretty Horses is sort of in-between: lush vistas (the same countryside as Blood Meridian), but quite a different story, more of a bildungsroman with love (thwarted love) and Quixotic searches. So, in a sense, McCarthy defies easy categorization. He is too broad a writer for that. But the one constant in the three books that I have read is the really superior writing.

I think this is your most interesting review yet, John, though it won't send me scurrying to read McCarthy's novels. I'm not a big fan of sustained violence. That being the case, I'm especially glad to have read your review. I'm reminded of a passage in Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. She says that all novels, no matter how tragic, are inherently hopeful because they show people making choices which affect the outcome of events.

I don't think the prose you cite from The Road is truly "pared to the bone." Compare Hemingway to see how much a writer can do with starkly unembroidered prose. But in view of the extraordinary passage you quote from Blood Meridian, it may well be as pared as possible. McCarthy's prose is so richly descriptive and dense with meaning, I can't imagine wanting him to pare it any further! And his books might not work at all absent the lushness of his prose style, which as you say, sweeps a reader along despite the bleakness of the settings and the brutality of the characters.

I highly recommend Smiley's book to all Books Compared members. She discusses 12 categories of novels: travel narrative, historical, biographical, the tale, the joke, gossip, epistolary, confessional, polemic, essay, epic, and romance. I'm not sure now where no. 13 comes in - will have to remember to look for this when I reread the book. She's writing primarily for other writers, but readers who enjoy delving below the surface of a story and comparing one type of story with another will also find this book of great interest.

I will look for Smiley's book which sounds very interesting. I do recommend that you try The Road because, as I say, the violence is more anticipated than actual. What really grips is the tension and the heart pounding fear. On the positive side, and what makes the book worth reading is the wonderful relationship between the father and son, depending completely on each other for life in a very dark world, but finding light there in themselves and in a vision of a better world, of values nurtured when all else around you is chaos. I find that this is one of those books that keeps percolating through your thoughts.

What did you think of McCarthy's The Crossing? It's on my bookshelf, unread except for the first few pages. My father passed it along to me a few years ago, but I had trouble getting into it and never got around to picking it up again. If I recall correctly, it seemed to move very slowly. I confess to being a very impatient reader, especially in certain moods.

I have not read The Crossing, but plan to do so soon. Right now I'm reading McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, basically a fast paced murder-thriller with an interesting cast of characters, and with McCarthy, you never know what is going to happen, no one is safe, no matter how innocent.

it's interesting what you say about the pared down quality of the prose, because reading back through the excerpts you've given us, it seems to me to be not pared down at all. I find it intensely visual and almost halucinatory, full of details and colours and textures. It reminds me of Heironymous Bosch.
I am definately going to check this writer out. Thanks John for your stimulating reivew.

Wow, those excerpts get me closer than I've ever been to wanting to read both these novels - I've always just heard plot summaries and been somewhat put off, but that language is so beautiful that I almost didn't care how horrible the events are being described. They reminded me in that way of "The Waste Land" - that a bleak, dead world is being described with such artistry and love that I don't really lose hope at all, but take heart that there are still poets bringing these landscapes to life...thanks for the review!

I stopped at Powell's City of Books on my way home today and picked up the three Virginia Woolf novels Karlus reviewed. Then I thought, gee, I really ought to give The Road a try, if only for yin-yang balance. They were sold out! Hmmm ... could John have had anything to do with that?

Margaret, I am absolutely Green! To live near Powell's...../sigh/ :D In one of their deliveries to me a map of the store and surroundings was included. Wowee!

Thanks for your kind words, emily...and you echo exactly what I friend of mine said after he read Blood Meridian on my suggestion: that in the hands of a lesser writer, the book would simply not work, but McCormack's artistry carries it through and brings it alive. I think this is very true for The Road as well.

And Margaret....if I am responsbile for increased sales of The Road, I sure hope people like it as much as I did!

I submit that Cormac's last 2 books- No Country for Old Men and The Road- signify a transition in his work. Indeed the language is far more sparse and the action is more fast paced. While in earlier books like Blood Meridian and , even, All The Pretty Horses many of the paragraphs were filled with imagery and inventive descriptions, his later work is more about bare-boned, page-turning tales of Good v Evil.

I had earlier posted a brief review of No Man... which I paste herein:

Just finished reading NO COUNTRY...and once you get past the initial thrill-seeking that smacked of gratuitous violence one may expect in a Tarrentino flick, you are left with a treatise on: good and evil, living life with regrets, not living up to one's ideals, how chance/luck- a coin flip- can decide one's fate, and how this country- the not so great anymore USA- is going literally to pot.

Makes one think about his own life, reflecting back on your own dark secrets and regrets and, in the last closing passage, Cormac almost warning us not to forget our parents, who despite whatever faults they, too, might have had, that if they were decent enough folks, they paved the way for us and will always be there, if only in our dreams, to pave the way forward as we move beyond life into the eternal darkness awaiting us all.

Turned out to be a good, quick read, only took me 2-3 days (on vacation) to devour. While not as powerful as his earlier masterpiece-BLOOD MERIDIAN- this book also takes on biblical themes and while it is not proportionate to the earlier epic, this smaller/less populated tale has lessons to teach and offers one or two surprises, the biggest one being that despite the old saying, in this tale, "the Devil DOES NOT get his due". In the closing sequence when Bell dreams of his father carrying a horn of fire to light the way ahead, Cormac could just as well be speaking of God paving the way.

Re-reading the above review I see how the theme of parents and their off-spring is repeated and how the parent leading the child to redemption or some optimistic hope, either in dreamlike fashion (as in No Country...) or by handing off to a benevolent figure (as in The Road), may speak to Cormac's own aging process and what Erik Erikson in Childhood and Society had described as The 8 Ages of Man:

the 7th stage centered on the struggle between Generativity v Self-Absorption (and stagnation) and the 8th (and final) stage the struggle between Integrity v Despair. From my reading, No Country... seems to lean towards Self-Absorption and Despair while in the subsequent, The Road, the ending speaks to Generativity and Integrity. Perhaps McCarthy is attempting to resolve his own issues and legacies as he grows nearer to the end of his road.

Needless to say I am a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy!

Bert, thank you for a fascinating theory, which rings true to me. The process of writing a novel requires an author to think deeply about a fictional character's psyche and the central challenge that character faces for a long enough time to complete a manuscript and revise it to the point that it works well for readers. That takes at least a couple of years for most literary novelists. A process like that must certainly have the potential to enlighten and change a person quite deeply. It would be interesting to look for evidence of this process in the work of other writers, too.

Welcome to Books Compared!

thanks Margad...it is my pleasure to be in the company of readers who compare, think and are passionate about what they read.

regarding sales of The Road...now that Oprah has picked up on it Cormac will deservedly become a wealthy man.

In response to your question, tomcat, about the darkness of McCarthy's vision, I can simply say yes. To elaborate in a way that accords with the Jane Smiley mention above about the intrinsic hopefulness of novels, I append a brief review I wrote about Blood Meridian a few years ago:

There is no bleaker or more bitter book. There is no better or more beautiful one, either. This novel, Cormac McCarthy's finest, depicts violence so depraved as to be almost unbearable, and doesn't ameliorate its impact by confining the evil within one or two sociopathic characters. His violence is institutionalized and endemic. His vision indicts the entire project of Western expansionism, and goes farther to become a threnody for the debased human condition.
The writing in this book, though, is so careful and pure that the act of reading it is itself redemptive. As the story grows ever more horrific and threatens to engulf the reader in despair, the cumulative power of detail and diction elevates the spirit and mind. More than almost any other book, "Blood Meridian" shows art's ability to ennoble us while it illustrates our worst aspects.
The experience is exhilarating.

Lucien- great comment...Blood Meridian is a major classic.

Beautiful review, Lucien!

"The writing in this book, though, is so careful and pure that the act of reading it is itself redemptive."

Well PUT!

5> all novels, no matter how tragic, are inherently hopeful because they show people making choices which affect the outcome of events.

I thought the point of The Road was that the characters' choices do not affect anything. In the book, the world is basically dead, and all the people who remain alive are subsisting on the remnants of what existed before. Although the father and son each cling to their own idea of morality ("carrying the fire" or whatever) the sheer bleakness of the setting makes the reader question what morality means.

There's an arresting passage near the end where an old man steals the father and son's few belongings, and the father tracks him down and takes everything from him: not just the food and blankets that were not his to begin with, but down to the clothes on his back. The father later says of it, "At least we didn't kill him," to which the son replies, "But we did kill him." This is the state of morality in The Road: an eye for an eye, kill others so that you may live. But if the earth cannot sustain life, then everyone is doomed sometime in the very near future, and surviving today means only that you have postponed the inevitable until tomorrow.

I'm on thin ice here, because I haven't read the book yet, but I wonder if (a) the father's efforts to care for the boy don't affect the outcome of events by making their lives more bearable as long as they last, and (b) the novelist's choice to write the book and the reader's choice to read it might not affect the outcome of events in the world outside the novel to at least some degree by shocking readers into taking better care of the earth while we still have some choice left. In some sense, the most important choice in the story may be the one made before the novel opens which results in the earth's devastation.

I was seriously considering a comparison between The Road and The Pesthouse but you have beaten me to it with the excellent reviews above.

I have yet to read The Road so it is difficult to compare directly, but The Pesthouse is also a post-apocalyptic world described by an English author Jim Crace. Like The Road it has had mixed reviews, mostly excellent.

As a direct comparison for writing style and comparison of this dystopian subject I would highly recommend Jim's book. His main characters display their moral composure, allowing the reader to identify with their dilemmas, providing encouragement and relief that humankind can survive near hell and yet retain their essential souls.

(I may be able to comment in the future after I reach The Road in my TBRs).

Without the authority of reading both books, I would suggest that the Crace book is less dark, and a more uplifting expose of such a world. I felt strangely encouraged by his writing. I would recommend it to all who read The Road. He is also has a spare writing style, with a beautiful ability to create an atmosphere out of simple evocative prose - YES - I did like his book alot.

Karen, I checked out your review of The Pesthouse and enjoyed it. The novel sounds very worthwhile, though the dialogue may be a stumbling block for American readers. The other reviews of this novel quote some snatches of dialogue that sound like they came out of an old Barney Google cartoon. (American writers can also be guilty of a poor ear for dialogue - a frequent sin is the use of "y'all" when addressing a single person - "y'all" is plural, and a very useful term indeed.)

........though the dialogue may be a stumbling block for American readers................

I don't quite know what you mean by this, Margad, as there did not seem to be any ambiguous dialogue - but I am English so maybe I did not notice. It was not written with any dialect inflections etc, that sometimes make a book more work.

The quotes given in some of the other readers' reviews sounded inauthentic - not the way Americans today talk. It's not that the meaning of the dialogue couldn't be understood, it's that the inauthenticity of the language would grate on readers' internal ears and get in the way of being able to lose oneself in the flow of the story.

It's similar to the way Irish readers, for example, might be bothered by the exaggerated tone of the dialogue in, for example, many of the romance novels that feature Irish characters.

Here's the thread on Cormac McCarthy, if anyone wants to revive and extend the discussion.

for a recent thorough and interesting overview of Cormac's body of work i suggest you read Scott Esposito's essay at The Quarterly Conversation:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/cormac-mccarthy-essay-the-orchard-keeper