the evening redness in the west

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

I first heard of Cormac McCarthy thanks to the Coen brothers and No Country for Old Men. When i saw that movie I was blown away by the dialogues and then when I read the book I found that all of the awesome writing came straight from the book. The Coens only had to cast and shoot. Anyway, that set me off on a search for more McCarthy and after the depressing Outer Dark and the coming of age western trilogy of All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain I finally got my hands on Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West.

McCarthy's west is quite unlike anything John Ford, Peckinpah or even the epic honour bound west of Leone. Instead, McCarthy's wild west is a savage unforgiving land where the only code is one of survival and honour is something no one's even heard of. The book begins with a boy referred to only as the kid as he leaves his home and sets out on a journey with no real destination. He joins the Glanton gang after some severe bad luck and comes into contact with Judge Holden. The Judge is a terrifying huge man, a polymath, ambidextrous and seemingly invincible. With the judge leading the motley group on an Indian scalp hunting mission across the border of Mexico the book basically becomes a tale of violence and survival. Seen through the Kid's eyes for the most part except when the character of the Judge threatens to overpower everything in it's path.

The violence in the book is only there to describe the nature of man and the extent he will go to to survive. The gang is a tight unit who describe all men of colour as nigger except the black man who rides with them and hunts with them. All men are equal and a part of the gang as long as they can shoot and scalp. The journey through the Kid's eyes is one of marked indifference. There's little the Kid thinks about. He thinks the Judge is full of shit but he follows him through hell and back. The judge is evil in a manner that is cold, intimidating and always carefully under control and held tight.

The scenes of slaughter are told with a detachment that makes it horrifying and McCarthy quite obviously loves his violence but never over plays his hand. Whether it's the Judge killing a young Indian boy he's rescued from a massacre, killing Mexicans and passing off their scalps as Indian or the lone black man in the party killing his namesake who keeps calling him nigger, the violence is always brutal but also always understated.

The book ends with the Kid bumping into the Judge again years after the scalping party. The two meet in a bar with a dancing bear working its magic on the bar and the Kid is now the Man. The Judge refers to the man as the 'last true dancer' and the Man still thinks the Judge is full of shit. Eventually the Man is attacked by the Judge although it's unclear if it ends in some serious sweaty fucking or if the Judge simply kills the Man.

The book finally comes to an end with the Judge dancing in a bar and proclaiming his immortality and an epilogue with a lonely figure marking fence holes in the ground with a bunch of people following him on the trail. It feels like the Wild West is over and done with and man has finally claimed this land.

This book blew my mind and along with the Border trilogy pretty much gave me a new outlook on the Wild West and the savagery of man. For those of you who read this but can't be bothered with the book, check out Ben Nichols and his Last Pale Light in the West. An absolutely awesome though thoroughly depressing set of 7 songs based on the book.


And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.
The judge looked about him. He was sat before the fire naked save for his breeches and his hands rested palm down upon his knees. His eyes were empty slots. None among the company harbored any notion as to what this attitude implied, yet so like an icon was he in his sitting that they grew cautious and spoke with circumspection among themselves as if they would not waken something that had better been left sleeping.