I'm really struggling through Blood Meridian, which is a shame as I'd been looking forward to reading it for a while. I think if you took 5 pages and studied the writing, it would be amazing. But I'm trying to read the whole book and is SO thick - 10 pages describing dirt and such.
I just saw this post.
I'm sorry that you are having trouble with the novel.
It is a dense book and chock full of description that, superficially, seems unnecessary. Like you, I generally abhor florid descriptions of scenery and once threw
Jane Eyre across a room, forswearing Bronte forever, after slogging through the third 500-word description of an English drawing room in a span of 20 pages.
It is not as easy to dismiss McCarthy, however. The narrator's syntax is simultaneously grand and colloquial, archaic and wholly invented. And it has the effect of investing in the landscape an importance it is not usually afforded other novels. In
Blood Meridian the land itself is a character--a character whose peculiar qualities move and shape the narrative as much as the wants and desires of the human characters.
It is also important to note that the novel's horrific and omnipresent violence is described in
exactly the same way: both eloquently and offhandedly, and with a gruesomely poetic attention to detail. This allows the reader to infer one of the novel's greatest themes: that murder and war are as essential to the idea of America as the land itself.
Dirt/violence is to
Blood Meridian what water/obsession is to
Moby ****.
But in addition to all that: McCarthy's syntax--while perfectly functional as a descriptor of action and
mise en scene--also provides much of the novel's narrative thrust. It is lyrical, propulsive, and downright poetic. Read the following paragraph out loud and see if you don't feel like Walt Whitman with a blue-steel erection:
From
Blood Meridian:
That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlighning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.
See what I mean? Descriptions of the landscape cannot be separated from the rest of the novel--they
are the novel. I hope you learn to like the book. As you can probably tell, it is among my favorites.