Haribol Acharya
Reading great books is like living a different life and experiencing the unusual. I always love to read a book that is exotic, that transports me to a world that is different than ours and that finally enables me to know something which I otherwise would never ever have known. In a sentence, it enables me to transcend the limits and boundaries of all that I know hitherto, and spurs me on to thinking differently and finally opens for me vistas of limitless possibilities and freedoms. Books help me enter landscapes of dreams and imaginations giving me the feel and thrill of something extraordinaire. That is exactly what happened when I read McCarthy’s the Road that revealed to me a dying world of apocalypse when the world turns into ashes with no living beings breathing around. That was a couple of decades ago. And I still recall sections though faintly and hazily in which the protagonist, the nameless person is haunted by the thoughts of his wife who committed suicide.
Now in my hand I have another book, not less intriguing, Blood Meridians or the Evening Redness in the Earth. The entire book centers on episodes full of murder, violence, racism and so on that takes the reader to a world of barbarism in which people live with hatred towards a clan or race that is different than them. Their appetite for violence is not promoted by the typical sense of racism, for they have the urge to kill anyone they confront. This is not just emblematic of how people behave spurred by an utter sense of nationalism, equipping themselves to slay ‘the other’ but they kill out of their ghastly urges and impulses.
The flairs of McCarthy lies in creating characters that are unusually unique who are sadistic, ruthless who murder people with no other motives than for bounty or kind of pleasure that is cruel and heartless. The central character around whom the entire episode spindles is ‘the kid’ who is an illiterate runaway who teams up with a gangster of scalp hunters. They together massacre Indians and many others in the United States-Mexico Borderlands. The story takes a big turn or results in an immense sway once the Kid who is illiterate meets Judge Holden who is immensely educated a member of the gang called the Glanton Gang.
Every writer has a theme in mind or that particular theme they want to put through a storyline, and as such McCarthy has a theme that is ghastly and gruesome. It is a story of violence and brutality and people trying to satiate their urges, the urge buried deep down in their psyches. This dystopian novel flinches from the old moral where the culprit goes through a series of purgation but in this antiheroic story the characters do not change and appear nihilistically driven. The horror of mass murder makes the story immensely appalling and shocking. One of the remarkable things about the novel is it proceeds in defiance of the old maxim that the whites are always villainous, they are indeed wicked brutes but here the characters of McCarthy’ story are exclusive and they murder people of all races. Here in the trend of writing novels the reader cannot meet characters good and bad as such, every character is vile and villainous or criminal.
The decay of religion or Christianity and the idea that God is benevolent is vivid when the kid is found sleeping in a church that is littered with feces. Killers justify the violence since they demonize their enemies. They consider the Indians they are killing heathens and savages.
Blood Meridians sees the Old West as a callous and coldblooded hells-cape. Attacks and sabotages happen without reason. The kid, the Runaway loses his innocence and his aptitude and taste for violence takes him to Captain White who is in defiance of the Law is relentlessly Waging a series of wars on Mexico. What is so distinguishing about the novel that makes it unique and unconventional is the Kid has a taste for killing any people, not just white or indigenous, Mexican or North American.
This short introduction does not say much of what happens in the novel, in fact it should not, or else the reader wouldn’t enjoy the ‘what will happen next’ idea that is crucial for the reader. The intent is, for the most part, to give a little background so that the reader will not get lost in the flow of the story. And what is more, it is not an easy novel at all and demands of the reader a good amount of concentration and contemplation. This world classic is a magnum opus of McCarthy and critic Harold Bloom praised the book immensely, to put it in his own words: More than successful. It’s not only the ultimate Western; the book is the ultimate dark dramatization of violence. Again, I don’t see anyone surpassing it in that regard.
On a final note I am sure the reader will find the book, fascinating, edifying and most of all this unfolds the fact about the world that is awaiting something horrifying if we do not set it in order.
