Blood Meridian — The Great American Novel That Changed How I View Literature
At the start of this year, I spent three months travelling southeast Asia. To help the often twelve hour plus train journeys go by, I took a book with me — Cormac McCarthy’s famous Blood Meridian.
After enjoyable reads of both No Country For Old Men and The Road, I was looking for my next novel, and after hearing that Blood Meridian is often considered as McCarthy’s best, I decided to give it a go. I actually started reading the book before my travels, but didn’t find myself enjoying it as much as I had expected. The long-winded, punctuation-lacking passages (that I had little to no trouble with in his prior novels) became particularly jarring here, and I found myself getting lost in the meandering nature of McCarthy’s prose, often to the detriment of my understanding of the writing.
As a result, this novel, which I now believe to be the greatest that I have ever read, sat gathering dust on my shelf for several weeks before I hastily stuffed it into my bag.
Cut to one week into my travels. I’m sat at the start of a nine-hour train journey in the south of Thailand, and I reach for my book.
I barely put it down.
Now, make no mistake, Blood Meridian is a difficult read. It’s often a struggle to accurately and…
