[In the following review, Hislop views Blood Meridian as more than a conventional Western, believing it to be a treatise on the interconnection of violence and culture.]

The sheriffs and gun-slingers of European culture have long preferred the American West on film rather than in fiction. While even “spaghetti” Westerns have been roped in as intellectual property, the novelists of the “Wild West”, like Holly Martins in The Third Man, are still not considered quite worthy of literary discussion. Though the abuser-friendly graffiti of any urban American literary urchin able to make a pun of “crack” is almost instantly beamed across the Atlantic, Cormac McCarthy's extraordinary, poetic novel about the West, Blood Meridian, published to critical acclaim in the United States in 1985, has only just appeared in Britain.

The novel is indeed a bloody affair, which spares no detail in its chronicling of atrocity. For most of its gory trail it describes the murderous progress of a band of Indian hunters in the 1840s who also prey on Mexicans and Americans. Images of gruesome perversity stand out from the daily round of shootings and scalpings: dead babies hanging from a tree, men crawling through the desert, the soles of their feet cut off by Indians, or flayed and roasting over a fire. Sometimes the violent imagery has a purer beauty, as when cannon balls come “loping through the grass like runaway suns”, and there is comic action and conceit. It is said of a whore-filled town “you can get clapped a day's ride out when the wind is right”. The book is written in a rich style, both colloquial and bookish, with biblical echoes of times when the word and blood were rhetorically joined, and a lyricism engaged with violence even when its manifestations are masked, as when the dust makes the riders, “black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces”, pale slowly and assume “the color of the land”.

Blood Meridian, however, is much more than a counterblast of bloody imagery against more cosy perceptions of the West. It is an exploration, at times explicitly philosophical, of the relationship between culture and violence. Two characters in particular map out the poles of the argument. The “kid”, who appears throughout the book, is first shown as an unlettered child possessed of a taste for mindless violence” who stumbles with almost unthinking animality into a life of killing. But the dominant figure is “the vast abhorrence” of Judge Holden, an enormous hairless man, full of learning and anarchic cunning, for whom war is a game, and violence not savagery but the triumph of man's will over nature. For him, “the order in creation which you see is that which you put there”; a scientist and philosopher, he records the world in writing and sketches. His devilish rationality, which literally masters unreason in the form of an imbecile who accompanies him as the band breaks up, gives him power to save and kill at whim. At the end the judge corners the kid in “the jakes” and there is only one left to dance naked, declaring his immortality, a dance of life which feeds on death.