Passions: How Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian serves as a guide to living a better life

Forget Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or Thus Spake Zarathustra – you can find more wisdom in the most violent book ever written: Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy’s great American anti-novel, Blood Meridian, is a book dripping with blood, nihilism and indifference towards human suffering - but within the book’s desert setting lies several oases of wisdom and spiritual guidance.

The 1985 novel, which sometimes devolves into a rambling stream-of-consciousness similar to Kerouac or Hunter S Thompson, follows an unnamed protagonist who navigates a world of male violence, competition and conquest in the American-Mexican borderlands in the mid 19th-century.

He escapes the clutches of his abusive father and flees into the world of the American west, where he eventually falls in with John Joel Glanton’s gang - a band of scalp hunters hired by the Mexican Government to hunt violent Apaches, but whose extreme nihilism and selfishness leads them to scalp any human being who crosses their path.

Blood Meridian reminds us that life is chaotic and prone to end at any moment - so live it pursuing life itself. Pic: Beowulf Sheehan/Penguin Random House.

Among their group is “Judge” Holden, a giant, hairless and pale man. He is a learned man, who can speak several languages and play any musical instrument. He is also a child killer, who is heavily implied to be the devil himself by several characters, and the main vehicle of McCarthy’s existentialism.

I read the book while travelling in Italy. I find trips abroad reflective anyway - the distance from your own world leads to a kind of dissociation and introspection - meaning one of the Judge’s set-piece speeches hit all the harder.

“The truth about the world,” the Judge says, “is that anything is possible.

“Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent.”

He continues: “Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you will not lose your way.”

The string in the maze highlights the absurdity of careers, religions and mortgages on a strange rock hurtling through space. Human society and the expectations it places on you are meaningless, argues McCarthy, who passed away last year.

In the carnage, the Judge believes that violence is the only true god - the ultimate game of fate and chance which decides which people and civilisations wither and which thrive.

Human history has perhaps proved him right, though for me this is his own ‘string a maze’ which he is unaware he is laying down in the chaos.

The only true tangibles in life are human relationships - love and caring - and simple pleasures.

Blood Meridian reminds us that life is chaotic and prone to end at any moment - so live it pursuing life itself.

Joseph Anderson is Health Correspondent at The Scotsman