Characters: C+
Writing: A
Plot: D
Pacing: D
Poignancy: B
Reading Blood Meridian isn't so much like reading a traditional novel as watching hours worth of old historical footage spliced together with no narration. Set around the US / Mexico border in the 1850's, during a series of violent raids and military skirmishes, there is never enough focus or plot to seem like, well, a novel. Like those old sepia-tinted movies, it's all wide-shots, jumpy unclear footage, sudden cuts from one scene to the next. You can tell you're following the same group of characters, but the camera rarely ventures close enough to learn anything about them, and most of the time all you see is one big mass moving about the screen. And like watching three hours of historical footage, it becomes increasingly tedious and disorienting the longer you stick with it — even if the scenery is nice and individual scenes, taken on their own, seem interesting enough at first.
Blood Meridian was probably one of the most difficult books I've ever tackled. It is a novel, technically, but the actual experience is more akin to reading a 300 page prose poem about gratuitous violence and desert landscapes, written in a sort-of stylized Biblical language. Blood Meridian follows a group of Americans wandering throughout Mexico, stopping at a dozen towns that all start to sound the same, fending off wildlife, Indians, angry Mexicans and ultimately killing lots and lots of people. That's it: there's no overall plot, no sense of momentum or purpose or change. Every chapter feels the same as the last, but with a few details changed. The group wanders, kills, rides, fights, kills. Characters join the group and soon leave, rarely staying long enough to be given a name. Without a plot, the book is disorienting enough as it is, but Blood Meridian lacks even a main character to center itself around — and this, ultimately, prevented me from every really becoming immersed in the story. Some summaries and reviews will try to tell you that "The Kid" is the protagonist of Blood Meridian, but that's bullshit. For the first 50 or so pages, The Kid is the driving force of the story, which at least seems like it's going somewhere in the early stages. Blood Meridian would have made for a fantastic novella, as it could have made its point without repeating itself over and over. But after the first few scenes, The Kid quickly fades from the picture, never amounting to more than a passive participant, just another member of the group. McCarthy goes for entire chapters without mentioning him at all. Open up Blood Meridian to a random page in the middle and the most common pronoun you will see is "they." "They" are the main character of the novel. If you wanted to be really flippant, you could boil the plot of Blood Meridian down to McCarthy's favorite pronoun + verb combo: "They rode...."
It's hard to review Blood Meridian for its various merits, as they are ultimately so lopsided. McCarthy clearly had a very specific goal in mind when he wrote the book, and its "thesis" is interesting enough: this is an anti-Western, an exploration of the endless cycles of violence that actually made up the Old West, rather than heroics and clear-cut gun duels. But as with performance art, your reaction will likely depend on how far you believe a 'statement' can sustain art. Is the mere statement or idea enough, without anything developing overtop of it? Blood Meridian is not a particularly deep book; maybe my attention-span was just so shot that I didn't notice its layers, but it seemed pretty one-note to me. They ride, they kill, people die. Violence is bad but unlikely to change, see? Do we need 300 pages of interchangeably gruesome events to make this point? Or at least, why couldn't McCarthy make this point while still crafting a plot?
This is a debate that I will likely end up on the losing side of, but it's nonetheless a huge beef that I have with the literary world today. There seems to be an unquestioned bias among literary readers that well-written prose is the primary goal of a story — and that plot, being on the other end of the spectrum, is not only cursory but even unnecessary. McCarthy seems to agree with this philosophy. I can't in fairness say that the plot of Blood Meridian is "bad" because he literally made no attempt to craft one. But why is this excusable, much less preferable? I should mention, if it's not too late, that Blood Meridian is considered not only the best of McCarthy's books but one of the best works of literature in the last half century by many smart people. Now, I can understand why some would enjoy it — the writing is absolutely fantastic on a technical level — but really, a landmark of contemporary literature? Frankly, I don't see why McCarthy's difficulty with plot is any more excusable than Dan Brown's inability to not write like a 5th grader. Sure, Brown is a truly awful writer, on a technical level, while McCarthy excels at this. But McCarthy cannot write plot, and Brown — for all his many flaws — knows how to shape a riveting story. My opinion of Brown as a writer is very low, believe me, but I'm merely trying to illustrate a point — why is there such favoritism for the various elements of a novel? Why is plot not considered important to a book's worth, when it's so crucial to the actual process of reading for many people? I found many sentences in Blood Meridian to be utterly stunning; some so well-written that I literally went wide-eyed. Yet even so, the book remained a chore to work through, and when I would sit down with it again, I was frequently unable to tell whether I had read a certain scene already or not, as they all end up sounding so similar. There's nothing more frustrating than that sudden, bitter feeling that there may be no point in actually reading a book to its end. As someone who enjoys the "story" aspect of "stories," a clear, strong narrative would have allowed me to enjoy Blood Meridian as more than a long string of beautiful words. No matter how beautiful the scenery, no matter how vast and striking the landscape, if there's no path to give you a sense of direction, you're eventually going to get lost.
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