On re-reading Blood Meridian

I have now read Blood Meridian three times. The first time I read it was before I began to blog about my reading experiences, the second time I reviewed it on my View Over the Bell blog , in 2011. Like all great works of literature, the urge to re-read came around this Christmas, and given I wasn't working, I got through it in about three days.

Again, like all great works of literature, the book has given me something different this time to the last time I read it, and the first. I wrote in 2011 that the major character of the work was Judge Holden. This time around, I'm not so sure. Glanton has loomed larger for me in this reading, as has the Kid. Glanton and the Kid together seem this time around to reflect man's reaction to the works of the Devil. Glanton succumbs to the temptations of the Judge, and falls into depravity, debauchery, greed and lust. The Kid sees through the evil that is the Judge, but fails to destroy him, whether through fear, or a misplaced sense of honour is unclear, but his failure to destroy the evil means that he will succumb to it.

This time around there was also more of a sense of the land as malevolent, and the human actors blundering about with no real purpose, except perhaps war. For war, in all its forms, has an important role in the book, in fact the book itself is perhaps about war - there is an instructive passage about two-thirds through (p. 248 in the 1992 Vintage ed.), spoken by the Judge - "It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awating its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."

"All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not."

"Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test."

Is the Judge "historical law"? Possibly. So many un-answered questions in this book.