Audiobook Review: Blood Meridian Or The Evening Sun in the West (1985) by Cormac McCarthy

 Audiobook Review

 Blood Meridian Or The Evening Sun in the West (1985)

by Cormac McCarthy

   The NYT announced with fanfare last month that they would be formally reviewing Audiobooks as separate works from the underlying print/ebook.  That's a huge shift since their prior recognition of the form was a semi-regular "AUDIOBOOKS" round up in their weekly book review.  If you've been reading this blog, you'll know that I've been a fan of Audiobooks for years because of all the driving I do back and forth between San Diego and Los Angeles.  I also rarely miss a chance to shill for the Libby library app, which allows you to check out Audiobooks for free from your local library- as valuable an app as I possess considering the price of an individual audiobook or Audible subscription. 

    Cormac McCarthy died earlier this year, which is a traditional trigger for evaluating an artistic career.  Not that McCarthy has much to worry about in that department.  Besides never winning the Nobel Prize, there wasn't much he didn't accomplish, and he did it all without prostituting himself to the cultural-industrial complex.  Whether you like his writing or not, like Bob Dylan, you have to respect his ability to do exactly what he wanted without caring about an audience, critical or popular. 

Here's a list of the McCarthy books I've read and written about- I've already done an Audiobook specific review of The Road.  I'm missing his first two books and his last two to make the set:

Child of God  (1973)

Suttree (1979)

Blood Meridian or the Evening Sun in the West (1985)

 All the Pretty Horses  (1992)

The Crossing (1994)

Cities of the Plain (1998)

The Road (2006) 

No Country for Old Men (2005)

  There can be no doubt that Blood Meridian was his breakout commercial AND critical hit.   My sense is that before Blood Meridian was released, McCarthy was four novels into his career, and he'd convinced his publisher that something was there worth supporting (this being the early 1980's and a reasonably good time to be publishing literary fiction), but he hadn't broken through with either the critics or the public.

  I went back and read the contemporary NYT review for Suttree published on February 18th, 1979, and it's clear that McCarthy wasn't close to a household name in 1979.  You can also see that this was still the case when Blood Meridian was reviewed by the NYT in 1985, it's a respectful review where the author clearly has an understanding of the appeal and potential of the book and author, but there are no references to the fact that McCarthy was already a cultural phenomenon. 

  My idea is that I'm going to go back and listen to all the McCarthy Audiobooks before I polish off the last four books I haven't read.  It was pretty straight forward for The Road, published in 2006 and after McCarthy had cemented his reputation with the Border Trilogy-  so it got an Audiobook published at the same time as the novel itself.  Things were less straightforward with Blood Meridian. Originally I checked out an eight hour abridged version before I found the unabridged 13 hour version narrated by Richard Poe and published in 2007.  The abridged version came out in 2009 and was narrated by Robert Slade.  I ended up listening to almost half the abridged version, so I can tell you that one thing the abridged version does is edit out the prolific and frequent use of the "n-word"- often used by the characters to refer to Native Americans.  

   The unabridged edition, on the other hand, captures McCarthy in his full glory- I think you can make the argument that an unabridged Audiobook of many of his works competes with the books themselves.  Certainly that's the case with Blood Meridian, where the distractions of McCarthy's austere punctuation are absent and you actually hear these characters make the speeches from the book, instead of having to do them in your head as a reader. 

    This is my second time through the book after reading it back in 2016- loved, loved, loved it back then.  Since then it's never been far from my thoughts, more so than the Border Trilogy, which is great, but, you know, a trilogy.  I've driven out to Yuma a dozen times and stopped at the Territorial Prison and overlooked where I imagine the ferry crossed the Colorado river in the book.  This time through, it seemed to me that the central fact of the book is what the character of Judge Holden says about War, which he addresses for the first time in Chapter 17:

The judge cracked with the back of an axe the shinbone on an antelope and the hot marrow dripped smoking on the stones. They watched him. The subject was war.

The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black.

The judge smiled, his face shining with grease.

What right man would have it any other way? he said.

The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there’s many a bloody tale of war inside it.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

He turned to Brown, from whom he’d heard some whispered slur or demurrer. Ah Davy, he said. It’s your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each.

My trade?

Certainly.

What is my trade?

War. War is your trade. Is it not?

And it aint yours?

Mine too. Very much so.

What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?

All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That’s your notion.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. Brown studied the judge.

You’re crazy Holden. Crazy at last.

The judge smiled. (page 259-261).

 

  I've bolded a couple of phrases there.  But it's also important to note that the Judge returns to the subject at the very end of the book- which- I hardly even remembered from when I read the book, where he says:

“As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance, and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?...Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.” (page 344)

   I think if you are looking at a statement regarding McCarthy's literary philosophy, these two sections contain it.  Not just for this book, but for all his books.   I think the natural connection for a 21st century reader to make between the Judge's speeches about war and the meaning of life are to equate them with the idea of social Darwinism- which was current at the end of the book- 1878, but not in the 1840's, when Darwin himself was just getting going.   A more likely influence seems like Baron Von Clausewitz, whose Theory of War was published in 1832.  McCarthy does include German among the Judge's languages- referred to as Dutch/Deutsch in the book, which was a contemporary usage back then. 

    The second time through, I was less taken with the idea that the Judge was somehow a supernatural entity.  Listening to the actual end of the book this time through, it struck me that the Judge was a more conventional 19th century adventurer and that the Judge's journey is no different than that of a dozen Joseph Conrad protagonists- men who seek to escape civilization for whatever reason and to misbehave in the uncivilized other.   The behavior can be seen both as an endorsement of colonialism or a critique of it, depending on the perspective of the reader. 

    The other aspect of Blood Meridian I focused on was the whole ending- everything that happens after the Yuma episode.  In that part of the book the Kid has a fever dream- the text of which I can't track down- while he's recovering from leg surgery in San Diego, that struck me as particularly important.