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If you've been desperate for a modern Testament, a covenant between The World and Us, or any sort of standalone veridical statement on existence, look no further. "Blood Meridian" is a story of life and death that reaches the literary apex of Scripture in its perfect enactment of events by characters so real their internal roilings are clouded to the point of complete speculative equivocation by total narration of visible actions and none of thoughts or feelings. The prose is grandiloquent and profound without seeming meretricious. The writing is poetic and philosophical, a child of the Greeks, the Gnostics, the monotheists, the Moderns, yet it erases history in its interior plotted framework to start over from the beginning. Anew. Ok, that's my cheap impression of McCarthy's prose-style. His Death-like antagonist, Judge Holden, is a better demon than any, Hannibal Lecter included, because he is not pain or suffering but instead the darkness that swallows up even these qualities. He is familiar with the concepts good and evil but dispels them in favor of a more powerful, deeper itch rooted in the deepest sanctum of the human form-- will. He embodies what it means to be human without the distracting elements which foist moral choice on us because we live on our mother the earth and have to deal with the other inhabitants of this war ground whom we daily find nettlesome and hateful. Somehow though, in spite of the torrents of blood in Blood Meridian and the apparent evilness of the Judge, McCarthy's outlook doesn't feel bleak, unlike in that mediocre appendage to McCarthy's oeuvre, The Road. As the Judge reminds us, stealing a line from Petronius, we all live together on our mother the earth, round as an egg, with all good things contained in her, like a honeycomb. I mean, that's not his final say or anything, but you'll like what he has to impart then too.

2022-11-14 16:43