Tried twice, failed twice. Cormac has a good track record with me – Child of God is a 5 star classic, No Country for Old Men is a 4 star classic, and Tried twice, failed twice. Cormac has a good track record with me – Child of God is a 5 star classic, No Country for Old Men is a 4 star classic, and All the Pretty Horses is a solid 3 star.
I knew Blood Meridian was the Big One. The Masterpiece. The one that fuses together The Bible and Clint Eastwood. The Kid with No Name and the Book of Deuteronomy. Years ago I got to the Tree of Dead Babies and jacked it in, I got a lot further this time, but yes, I jacked it in again. I tried reading it as an extended metaphor – The Judge and his band of murdering renegades is like….Corona Virus! Of course! But it got a little tiresome : Judge/Corona comes to town, slaughters people, leaves. Repeat. Repeat without any end in sight.
GOOD AUTHORS CAN WRITE ONE BAD BOOK
Here’s a little list – I haven’t read these but I’m told they’re all dreadful
The Breast : Philip Roth The Body Artist : Don Delillo I Am Charlotte Simmons : Tom Wolfe The Silmarillion : Tolkien Dhalgren : Samuel Delaney Jazz : Toni Morrison The Name Of The World : Denis Johnson
But the point about Blood Meridian is that most people think it’s not bad, it’s great. I need to think about that.
CORMAC MCCARTHY’S LANGUAGE
On the level of plot, this book leaves something to be desired. But not all books have to have an interesting story. Some novels are essential for the brilliance of their language alone. Ain’t no story in Ulysses worth a bent farthing. And the whale is nowhere to be seen for most of Moby Dick. This type of book is on a whole other level, where vocabulary, clauses, gerunds, rhetoric works a magic to draw aside the clouds in our minds and present us with something grand we could not have suspected was there. Blood Meridian’s fans say that’s what this book does.
The horror of the American frontier, as McCarthy unflinchingly renders it, can prove rather wearying, not least for the book’s stubborn refusal to indulge in such niceties as comic relief or variations of setting and tone. What makes Blood Meridian endurable — what makes it so compelling once you adapt to its rhythms — is McCarthy’s prose. The man makes even the most repulsive images seem ineffably beautiful. He makes hell sound sublime.
And there are sentences here that will make you gasp in a good way .
They rode through regions of particoloured stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm.
I love that, I have no problem with the and…and…and. But then you get other wanna-be-great sentences like this :
The ground where he’d lain was soaked with blood and with urine from the voided bladders of the animals and he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself.
It’s okay until “some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself.” Then it’s just portentous empty gesturing. You could read that phrase in an early Marvel comic.
It seems I look at this stuff differently to some readers. One reviewer singled out this passage for great praise.
The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.
But I get to the end of that and I think come on Cormac, stop trying so hard. Each fire is all fires. Horse is the horseness of all horse. Yeah yeah.
A TALE OF SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFYING NOTHING
A guy called Joseph Hirsch put his head above the parapet
I find the novel to be a pretentious, nearly-unreadable pastiche hybrid of every writer from Ernest Hemingway, to H.P. Lovecraft, to Norman Mailer.
….a blend of Hieronymus Bosch and Sam Peckinpah; of Salvador Dali, Shakespeare, and the Bible; of Faulkner and Fellini; of Gustave Dore, Louis L ‘Amour, Dante, and Goya; of cowboys and nothingness; of Texas and Vietnam.
Over the course of a novel of epic length, however, attempting to decipher the meaning of McCarthy’s words merely becomes a psychic endurance test. Along with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, I read Blood Meridian cover to cover, not because I enjoyed it, but because I hated it, and felt that by finishing the book I was somehow defeating an unseen, unfathomably alien intelligence that had lured me into a masochistic test of wills, from which I could only emerge victorious after reading my way through the gauntlet of senseless words laid across the page.
SIMILES, SIMILES, I’M GIVING THEM AWAY TODAY, ONLY FIVE DOLLARS FOR A PACK OF TWELVE, ROLL UP, ROLL UP
In this novel, not in the others I have read, Cormac was gripped with a sporadic Tourette’s syndrome of similes. He just can’t help himself. For three or four pages at a time, out come the similes, they pepper the reader like… er…. Like…. Cormac, help me out here…
From pages 45-47
Like pencil lines Like strands of the night Like tentacles Like an army asleep on the march Like dogs Like loom-shafts Like sidewinder tracks Like a ghost army Like shades of figures erased upon a board Like pilgrims exhausted Like reflections in a lake Like a great electric kite Like slender astrolabes Like a myriad of eyes Like the palest stain Like a land of some other order Like some demon kingdom
So that began to wear me down too.
VIOLENCE
The endless chopping up of women in 2666 and American Psycho were too much for me, although I don’t have a problem with A Clockwork Orange and Titus Andronicus . I don’t claim to be Mr Consistent. But I hated the endless massacres in this one. And pretty much that's all there is. Maybe I just had my fill of violence. Blame the movies.
NO CONCLUSIONS FOR OLD MEN
Is this an existential cry of despair from the American past, followed by The Road, a cry of despair from the American future? Gotta say, that’s what it looked like to me. Blood Meridian has now beat me to the ground and disembowelled me twice, there won’t be a third time. I quit. Stop kicking me, Cormac.
Acknowledgements : the nasty comments about BM are from an article called Why I don’t bow before Blood Meridian By Joseph Hirsch and the respectful comments are from James Dorson in his article Demystifying the Judge: Law and Mythical Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian....more
He described Lonesome Dove as a "pretty good book".
****
Larry McMurtry is as surefooted asRevived review
RIP Larry McMurtry 3 June 1936 - 25 March 2021
He described Lonesome Dove as a "pretty good book".
****
Larry McMurtry is as surefooted as any cowboy’s favourite horse. He never trips or stumbles. It doesn’t take many pages before you know this is a 5 star book.
As you know this is the enormous story of a big old cattle drive from Texas to Montana. That’s kind of it. Bits get added on here and there but the main idea is to get these thousands of cows across 3000 miles of dangerous territory, through sandstorms, blizzards, bandits, droughts, through Indian nations, across rivers, via grizzly bears and hardly a single town in sight the whole way.
It becomes clear that these cowboy guys did not need a 7-Eleven or a Stop & Shop. The whole natural world was their Stop & Shop. If they needed lunch they shot it.
There are a couple of things that might set modern readers on edge a bit. Nearly all the female characters are or were whores (their term). And the Native Americans take the usual beating:
“How many Indians were they?" Pea tried to think. “A bunch jumped us,” he said. “About twenty, I guess. Gus shot a few.”
There are a few oddities. There is an awful lot of loping in this book. Horses never canter or gallop or trot, they lope. Loping is also done by coyotes, wolves and men.
There is one of the greatest ninja warrior manic dream pixie girls, a wild child called Janey.
And the cowboys, tough as they are, don’t swear. They say “Dern” when provoked.
LOVE IN THE OLD WEST
In a beefy tough guy story like this love looms large. You might not think, but it does. But it’s the kind of love unknown in the modern world. A man sees a woman two or three times, perhaps doesn’t even speak to her, and he’s in love, and stays thinking about her for the next year. He’s a thousand miles away, it doesn’t matter. These days the internet allows us to fall in love with people we never met either, so times haven’t changed that much.
AN EXAMPLE OF MALE FEMALE RELATIONS IN LONESOME DOVE
“What was it you said?” he asked finally. “I said we oughta get married,” Louisa said loudly. “What I like about you is you're quiet. Jim talked every second that he didn’t have a whisky bottle on his mouth. I got tired of listening. Also, you’re skinny. If you don’t last, you’ll be easy to bury. I’ve buried enough husbands to take such things into account. What do you say?”
THE TOUGH MINDED WOMEN IN LONESOME DOVE :
Clara is looking after someone who is ill :
“Oh , you don’t have to thank me for a washrag,” Clara said. “I’m not much of a nurse. It’s one of my failings. I’m too impatient. I’ll give a person a week or two, then if they don’t improve I’d just about as soon they’d die.”
THE TOUGH MINDED MEN IN LONESOME DOVE
“I once drank the urine of a mule. It kept me alive” Po said.
LARRY MCMURTRY’S EYE FOR DETAIL IN EVERY ASPECT OF LONESOME DOVE :
Some of the cattle were so weak the cowboys had to dismount, , pull their tails and shout at them to get up.
(He knows the cowboys would pull the tails).
A RATHER BAD SCRAPE ONE OF THE CHARACTERS GETS INTO
He was naked, unarmed, without food and something like a hundred miles from the wagon. He didn’t know the country and was up against some tough Indians who did.
THE OLD COWBOY SONG LONESOME DOVE REMINDED ME OF :
Old Paint
When I die, take my saddle from the wall And put it on my pony, and lead him out of his stall; Tie my bones to his back, turn our faces to the west And we'll ride the prairies that we love the best.
LONESOME DOVE IS LORD OF THE RINGS, ALMOST
And something I noticed – it could be that this is in the nature of most epic stories, but there was a Lord of the Rings vibe about the shape of the whole thing. The first 100 page is as leisurely and unhurried as the first 100 pages of LOTR leading up to Bilbo’s birthday party. A little later the Company of the Ring is formed (nine members). In Lonesome Dove the two ex-Rangers put together a Company themselves for their epic task - seven members. There isn’t a Mordor or a Dark Lord, but the Indians are the Orcs, for sure. Then after the task is accomplished, there is an elegiac, lengthy return to the Shire encountering old faces along the way, exactly mirrored by Captain Call’s return to Lonesome Dove.
FOOTNOTE : MODERN WESTERNS
This is the 6th I’ve read so far. All either good or great.
True Grit by Charles Portis The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt The Thicket by Joe R Lansdale News of the World by Paulette Jiles All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
When I was a kid Westerns were all over the tv (Bonanza, High Chaparral, all those 1940s horse operas) and I more or less despised them. Then Clint Eastwood rescued the whole genre. Then Hollywood and tv mostly got tired of the Western. But now these modern writers have kicked the whole thing back into life....more
I would advise not reading certain parts of this book at the breakfast table or on a bus or during your dinner hour at work as it is possible that youI would advise not reading certain parts of this book at the breakfast table or on a bus or during your dinner hour at work as it is possible that your nasolacrimal ducts may spontaneously issue forth liquid material that may flow copiously down your lower face and chin and may possibly cause ignorant people to stare. Now I am not saying that this happened to me, but it could have, had I not have taken precautions.
Years ago I discovered the genre I call Modern Victorian (The Quincunx, Fingersmith, The Crimson Petal and the White) and now I realise there is a companion genre Modern Western, of which the granddaddies must be Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry but then we have such stuff as True Grit and The Sisters Brothers and now News of the World.
So, to cut a long story, I loved this and could see Donald Sutherland as the old peripatetic newspaper reader (it was a thing in 1870) Captain Kidd and McKenna Grace, the kid from the maths-genius film Gifted, as Johanna, captured by the Kiowa at aged 6 and now recaptured aged ten. The captain is tasked with returning this girl back to her aunt and uncle. It’s a long way (from Wichita Falls to near San Antonio, hostile country nearly all the way). The kid does not want to be taken. The kid thinks she is a Kiowa because now, she is.
Maybe the drawback of Modern Westerns is that the plot is always about some long ass difficult journey with irritable types wanting to shoot you every minute of the livelong day. But then, maybe that’s a strength because these long ass journeys are very cool, featuring animals (there is always one beloved horse with one eye and a heart of gold) and bandits (always one bandit with one eye and a heart of gold) and gruesome deaths. There is also a lot of nature, given that mostly things take place in the open air. So, flowers and trees and gurgling streams and suchlike. That’s nice. Paulette Jiles knows the names of all of this greenery. Myself, I know rose and tulip and daisy. That’s about it.
As well as the gunplay and third-class travelling and salty conversation there is always some strong emotion sloshing about, attacks can come from anywhere, so like I say, read this book in private, away from uninformed eyes that know nothing of the great difficulty of transporting a ten year old girl through many dangerous situations in order to deliver her like a package; and the love that gets mixed up with it all....more
A month ago I was dutifully slogging through a few more of those 1001 Films You Must Watch Before Brexit Exterminates all Life in Britain and I came uA month ago I was dutifully slogging through a few more of those 1001 Films You Must Watch Before Brexit Exterminates all Life in Britain and I came upon My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) and Shane (George Stevens, 1953) and that’s when I gave up watching westerns. These movies were so stupid it embarrassed you to see grown up people acting in them. However, strangely, in future I will be most happy to read a western, because the books never disappoint. Modern westerns, that is, like True Grit or The Sisters Brothers, and now The Thicket.
This is the fifth Modern Western I have read and there is a pattern to these things (leaving aside Cormac McCarthy who is a universe unto himself). They are all comedies, that’s to say extremely deadpan black comedies; they are all first person narratives; they are all very violent; and the story is the same. The same! It’s always the tale of a manhunt. There is a crime, the desperadoes get clean away, then the pursuit begins. There is a showdown! Hats and bullets and body parts will be flying, of that you are guarandamnteed. The Old West, especially Texas, must have been crisscrossed with thousands of tough guys and some tough women looking for other tough guys and mostly dying horribly, whether pursued or pursuing. Seems that in the Old West if you made it through the day with only a flesh wound, that was a pretty good day. It’s surprising anyone got to be over 17 years old in Old West.
In a modern western it must be admitted there is a pandering to the modern reader. In a very racist world, the good guys are never racists themselves, they always have black comrades, and in this book the assembled avengers incorporate other minorities too, there is a young prostitute, a person of restricted growth, and a big ole pig, named Hog, who rushes in and chews off bad guys’ feet when required. In the real Old West the good guys were probably just as racist and dismissive towards persons of restricted growth as the bad guys, but you can’t have your good guys being racist in a modern novel, it would not do.
This is really a 3.5 star novel, I could nitpick a little bit as for instance the big shootout, man, that goes on too long, and the long distance rifle shot that finally brings down the villain is blatantly stolen from The Magnificent Seven. And the pig was throughout a little too ridiculous, I fully expected it to talk at one point. And plus, we also have a revival of that well-loved character the Tart with the Heart of Gold.
But I am rounding it up because it was such fun! I had nearly forgotten what fun was, what with trying to read some literature recently. ...more
The Sisters Brothers is the son of True Grit, a funny, heartbreaking 5 star novel from 1968. Same genre – unconsciously-hilarious wild west memoir wriThe Sisters Brothers is the son of True Grit, a funny, heartbreaking 5 star novel from 1968. Same genre – unconsciously-hilarious wild west memoir written in curious stiff slightly formal and stilted but purely beautiful language beginning at the beginning and driving the surprising narrative always forward without stopping to apologise to all the dead people and animals encountered en route.
At this point you may say that this thing has also been done recently and won a big bad Booker for itself - True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. Yes, it is very similar, but Peter Carey over egged his pudding to a most nauseating level. You could not believe a word of it. It was catwalk fashion, it wasn’t what people really wear. Patrick DeWitt does not make this mistake.
Pedants and proofreaders may go a little crosseyed looking at the title, their eyes searching searching for the missing apostrophe – surely it should be The Sisters’ Brothers? But could they have made such a terrific error? No error, this is the story of two guns for hire whose surname is Sisters, and is narrated by the frankly fat one (he goes on a diet around page 50) Eli Sisters. They are already famous for shooting people and this is the story of how they came to change their ungodly lifestyle.
All the way through Eli struggles with the horrible stuff these brothers find themselves doing. He doesn’t want to shoot all these people but he finds he seems to have to. It’s upsetting. He gets so mad at these people making him have to shoot them that he wants to shoot them. What a conundrum!
Horses, especially a wonky donkey of a horse called Tub, feature very prominently. Strong believers in animal rights and all vegans should be advised that there are more than a few scenes in here that are guaranteed to make all individual hairs on their body, should they have any, stand straight up perpendicularly. Poor old Tub. And what happens to the beavers is most distressing too.
What happened to the fifth star? Well, Eli Sisters is a compelling narrator all right but him and his brother are a tough sell. They’re really not nice people! And the ending, the one after the actual ending, was strange, like one of those unresolved chords they sometimes end a song with.
So, 4.5 stars. Don’t feel bad Mr DeWitt, I don’t never hardly give out 4.5 stars....more
Finding a novel which you can recommend to everybody Revived review
R.I.P. Charles Portis 1933-2020
creator of Mattie Ross, who will live forever
*******
Finding a novel which you can recommend to everybody is really not easy. Look at these totally five-star novels :
Lolita? nah, it’s about a paedophile
Ulysses? absolutely not, too hard, and no plot
Moby Dick? you kidding? recommend this and lose your friends!
A Clockwork Orange? – it’s not even in English!
Trainspotting? – see Clockwork Orange
Memoirs of Hadrian? See Ulysses, only also, it’s Roman
Blindness? it’s horrible!
But here is True Grit, which I recommend to all goodreaders. (Are there any badreaders? Is there a Badreads.com? What do they do?)
True Grit is as salty as a bag of salt salted by extra-salty salt. It’s deadpan and hilarious. It was almost buried by one dreadful movie version, the first one, then rescued by a wonderful version. I don’t usually rush to read the bookofthemovie but the voice of 14 year old Mattie Ross whose story this is is brilliant :
Rooster talked all night. I would doze off and wake up and he would still be talking. I did not give credence to everything he said. He said he knew a woman in Sedelia, Missouri, who had stepped on a needle as a girl and nine years later the needle worked out of the thigh of her third child. He said it puzzled the doctors.
Mattie’s lack of any sense of humour along with any reasonable sense of self-preservation makes a violent story into pure comedy. The collision of the great Falstaff-as-Terminator character of Rooster Cogburn and the innocent-but-uncanny Mattie is a kind of love story. Love has many faces. Rooster is not any kind of role model for a young person. The whole thing reminds me of the ballad “On the Trail of the Buffalo”, especially this verse
Well the working season ended, but the drover would not pay He said “You went and drunk too much, you’re all in debt to me” But the cowboys never did hear of such a thing as the bankrupt law So we left that drover’s bones to bleach on the hills of the buffalo
It took me several days to read this short novel because of one thing and another, but also because after a few pages I would just like to stop and savour it. It’s a fast read but I was slowing down all the time.
[image]
“Who is the best marshal they have?'
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'
A large auditorium. The audience is abuzz with low-quality hysteria. Who’s up next? A glowering old man stands on the vast stage. AMERICA'S GOT TALENT
A large auditorium. The audience is abuzz with low-quality hysteria. Who’s up next? A glowering old man stands on the vast stage. He’s got a guitar and one of those neck-brace harmonica things and he looks mortally offended. He always looks like that though.
Simon: And what’s your name?
Man : Cormac McCarthy.
Simon : Where are you from?
CM : Rhode Island.
LA Reid : Would you say you had a philosophy of life?
CM : There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.
Cheryl Cole : Awa, tha wez canny good but Ah think it wez above me heed.
[image]
Paula Abdul : What are you going to do for us, Cormac?
CM : It’s called “All the Pretty Horses”.
Simon : Okay, in your own time.
[image]
CM performs “All the Pretty Horses”. Shots of 14 year old girls in the audience looking bewildered. Every time CM mentions violent death the boys whoop and cheer.
Simon : Er, okay, we’ll go straight to the vote. Cheryl?
CC : When Ah wis a bairn Ah used te gan te Sunday school - yon bonny lad soonds jes like yon Bible but wi cooboys. Wis there any cooboys in the Bible Simon?
Simon : Is that a yes or a no?
CC : Well… It’s sort of a yes…
Simon : Paula?
Paula : I’m so grateful that ordeal is over. I’m too old for this crap.
[image]
Simon : So that’s a no.
LA Reid : I have to say – Cormac – did you have any idea how much you were getting on our nerves? Was it necessary to start every single sentence with for, and, yet, so – it was conjunction city. So here's another short word for you. It’s a no.
Simon : Well (with a superior smile which one sweet day someone will knock off his face) I liked it. It was different. Admittedly you lost about two thirds of the audience after chapter three but that doesn’t have to be a disaster. I think you’ve really got something. Look, Cormac, I don’t really think the X Factor is the proper venue for your kind of talent. You know you have to have three votes out of four to pass the audition process but in your case I’m going to say see me after the show. I think we could work something out.
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