Blood Meridian opens on a child and does not give him a name worth keeping. McCarthy’s prose is King James crossed with a field report. The Glanton gang rides a border that is also a metaphysics: Apache, Mexican, settler, animal, all available to the gun. The book is often called a Western. It is a Western the way Job is a pastoral. The genre is there so it can be emptied.
Judge Holden is the emptying. He is learned, huge, hairless, fond of children and of argument. He sketches the world in a notebook in order to abolish it. War, he says, is the real god; everything else is costume. The coin trick is his emblem: value as sleight, chance as a sermon, power as the hand you did not watch. To argue with the Judge is already to sit at his table. The kid tries not to. The book does not pretend that refusal is easy, or even available for long.
Beowulf’s mead-hall was a theory that the dark could be held outside a ring of light. Grendel listens to the harps and hates them. McCarthy’s desert has no hall. The Judge’s claim is that the harps were always a lie, and that the only honest music is the one he dances to at the end. It is a disgusting theology and a serious one. American literature had been telling a story about the West as innocence under pressure. This book answers: innocence was not there.
The sentences remain, even if you reject the Judge (you should). They are the reason the novel belongs in a Folio rather than in a cabinet of atrocities. Cadence is not forgiveness. It is the sound of a language that has decided not to look away, and has found, in not looking away, a music it might have preferred not to know it had.