Blood Meridian

The greatest novels in the English language are not only excellent narratives; they enrich the language, show its beauty, invent and make us realize how language is not a dead entity, instead very much alive. They're exhilarating, they energize, they inspire. Melville's Moby-Dick: or, the Whale (1851) certainly fits the bill. So does Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness In the West (1985), Cormac McCarthy's epic among his epics.

The best books aggrandize the act of reading itself. The joy of reading enthralling literature is immense. Only a handful have replicated my feelings for Blood Meridian; it's impossible to stop thinking about it, either between reads or after finishing. Its atmosphere and language are completely engrossing. Judge Holden, just like his predecessor proper, Captain Ahab, is beyond explication, since he's supposed to be superhumanly omnipresent, omniscient. He remains an enigma from beginning to end, and for this reason he's so mysteriously transcending. He's evil just as Iago is, yet unlike Iago, we never learn to understand him too much, not even at his most passionate, as evasion is how he converses with us. He breathes life into the narrative and we can't get enough of him.

McCarthy's prose is poetic, visual. The first line of the book emphasizes this well, being one of the most beautiful openings to any book I know of: “See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves.” It reads like a poem. But my favorite part, in fact the image that has become the emblem of McCarthy for me can be found from Chapter XV:

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the ordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon.