This is, I guess, fairly arbitrary, because it's just what i'm reading at the moment. However - it is the best thing I've read for quite some time: "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy. It's a tale of a bunch of scalp-hunters in frontier America in the mid - 19th century. NOT a "Wild West" story. Its major theme seems to be the notion that the history of human progress is a history of murder and brutality, that the destructive nature of humanity is our destiny and greatest achievement. i think he uses the "Wild West" because of its mythical properties, which the book is dripping in, and to concrete the link between progress and bloodshed. It is as if the characters are perched at an apex of history and endeavour, the "blood meridian" of the title. The prose is wonderful, generally sparse, certainly never unecessarily embellished, but still uses incredibly vivid description, and occasionally reminds you of narrative voice in startling ways. Tight characterisation, reminds me a bit of what Hemingway writes about in "The garden of Eden", the idea that you don't describe why a character does what ze does, you just understand why they do it and then write it.
I couldn't finish this rant without mentioning: fucking brutal, unflinching descriptions of all manner of atrocity (perpetrated by both whites and Indians). Never gratuitous, but still shocking.
God, i have in no way communicated a fraction of the power of this book. I'm about four fifths of the way through, and the scalp hunting party who are the focus of the book have become ghastly everymen stalking some hellish landscape and the impacable murderous intent of some external force, be it the darkness within man or some tyrant god, is increasingly palpable. And I am now utterly convinved that one of the main characters is Satan. Not some symbol for Satan, but actually the big evil Devil himself. |
