Reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

James Bowers

Bowers' slim book (actually, an essay that's been bound and sold, at a guess) is not your typical piece of McCarthy scholarship (or if it is, I've been reading the wrong books). In fact, more than a piece of scholarship, it's a deep reading and interpretation of the material; rather like a concordance, but without the huge lists of page references. Don't get me wrong, there's the usual scholarly stuff here, but it confines itself to the first pages. The bulk of this is a description, almost a review of the novel, but one that mentions many salient points in passing for the reader who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the novel. Very nice work, with a number of catches of minor images and the like that might not occur to most people (and judging from the critical works I've read, haven't occurred to most critics, either). In fact, the only real problem with it is that Bowers never goes beyond this stage; he doesn't take it all and draw it into any major analysis of the work, beyond the review-level kind of stuff that's interspersed in the text (mainly potshots at critics who didn't get it; amusing, but not really in-depth). I'd love to see this turned into a full-length critical work. It's a great beginning.