Cormac was a rite of passage for a certain class of artistically orientated male Londoner back in the nineties. Perhaps because all his novels seem to be constructed around the notion of young men enduring their rites of passage. Perhaps because the apparent harsh reality of McCarthy’s world was such a counterpoint to our urban existence. Secretly we all longed to be riding a horse across the frontier, the horse being our best friend, in order to confront the innumerable demons that growing up threw at us. Blood Meridian contains the coming of age thread, even if it is less pronounced than in later works. The kid who becomes part of Glanton’s scalping band, and obtains an existential nemesis in The Judge, is blood brother to the young men in The Crossing and All The Pretty Horses. There is something brittle about McCarthy’s neo-biblical prose, as though you could pick it up and snap it and feed it to desert fire. Is it truly as powerful as it would like to be, or is there a cod-potency, which is achieved by whacking the reader over the head with relentless descriptions of suns rising and moons waxing, mountains on the horizon, violence forever around the corner? The books cry out for a female or feminist reading to counterbalance all their raging testosterone, with women barely featuring in the gothic western. As a man, you find yourself thinking, it’s pushing all these buttons, but what would I think if I was a woman reading this? Perhaps there’s something elemental at work here, a subversive analysis of gender - or perhaps not. The strange thing about violence is that it becomes oddly repetitive and its power seems to diminish as a result; power tires of itself, and in the end the kid, one can’t help thinking, will be happy to be put out of his misery, to escape the nihilist world he has been condemned to ride through.
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