Apparently Kyle thinks he gets this book, so he sent in a review.
By Kyle:
This book takes on large themes-Empire, economy, death, and man’s dominion over nature and meaning–without blinking. As McCarthy follows a gang of scalp hunters through the southwestern borderlands, he both crumbles and strengthens the American meta-narrative, never stopping to mourn what has been lost.
The novel, perhaps one of the most violent books ever written, is at least partially based on the exploits of the Glanton gang, a group of mostly American mercenaries led by John Glanton under contract with the Mexican government to hunt and kill bands of Apaches in what is now the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico. The gang was paid per scalp, but soon started scalping non-Apaches and everything in their path before finally running afoul of the authorities.
The most menacing character in the novel, however, isn’t Glanton, but Judge Holden, another character loosely based on a shadowy figure mentioned as being a member of the gang in Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession. The Judge speaks a number of languages, is a virtuoso on the violin, and seems to have extensive knowledge regarding just about everything. He is also described as a hairless man of great size who may or may not be a murderous child molester. One of the Judge’s hobbies involves sketching and classifying what he sees during the gang’s journeys. He has a notebook full of drawings of animal life, Indian rock drawings, and other phenomena. This is where the novel takes a critical turn. After the Judge has recorded the objects in question into his notebook, he destroys them, giving his representations of those objects primacy over the articles themselves.
Then, there is McCarthy’s prose–stark and evocative of the old testament-like beauty of the landscape he describes. Despite being historically accurate, the language also feels foreign to the reader in much the same way McCarthy’s version of the conquering of the west may seem foreign to those raised on Hollywood westerns. The total effect is an encounter with a sort of radical otherness that McCarthy might characterize as “the very life of the darkness.”
