Made of Library

There are a few books by Cormac McCarthy that have been on my TBR list for a long time, Blood Meridian is one of them. I hope that the others are quite different because I’m not sure this is an experience I want to go through again. The time and place in which this novel is set is not one that I’m familiar with. If I knew more about the historical context it was set in, I might have more of an appreciation of the story. That’s entirely my failing, though, not the authors. I love history, but I freely admit that my knowledge is limited to my favourite historical eras and events, I’m not as widely read in history as I should be and this period in American and Mexican history is largely unknown to me. The entire novel mirrors the experience of war. Long stretches of boredom with nothing much happening, punctuated by battles of horrific brutality. The long stretches between battles mostly occurred in the desert. I suppose my desert vocabulary isn’t that huge, but at times

Mother told me not to go all the way to the end of the garden path. I was to go as far as the big tree on the left, the one that had the big knot in its trunk that looks like a man’s face. When I reached that tree I was to turn around and come back. I didn’t listen to Mother. Aunt Izzy said Mother is just being sensible and it’s for my own good. Aunt Izzy said that next time she visits she would come with me and we would be allowed to go past the tree with the man’s face. She said that maybe we would even find a fairy ring out there. I didn’t wait until Aunt Izzy’s next visit. Now the King is saying I have to complete his quest before I can go home again. That’s why I started to get scared. Then I started crying. I told the King “I don’t want to complete a quest, I just want to go home!” “Then why didn’t you stay at home in the first place, instead of coming bumbling your way into my kingdom, disrupting the peace?” “I’m sorry, I just wanted to see a fairy ring,” I said. “A