Guest review by Wes Magee: BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

"It is a fine achievement to blend the blood-saturated brutality of the humans with the raw beauty of the natural world. McCarthy makes it work, seamlessly."

Wes Magee is a former headteacher who has been a full-time author since 1990. He has published more than a hundred books for children - poetry, fiction, plays, and picture books - and seven collections of poems for adults.

No Man’s Land (Blackstaff) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and The Very Best of Wes Magee (Macmillan) won The Children’s Poetry Bookshelf Award.

Towards the end of the most recent ice age, between 15,000 and 10,000 years BC, a land bridge existed between north-east Asia and Alaska. The bridge, which now lies beneath the Bering Strait, probably facilitated the slow migration of nomadic hunter-gatherers into the American continent, people eventually spreading down the eastern seaboard as far as the southern tip of Chile. Others spread east, possibly joining with Europeans who had trekked over the extended Arctic ice shelf.

In 1492 AD Christopher Columbus’s expedition across the Atlantic made landfall at a Caribbean island. Thinking he had discovered a west route to the East Indies, Columbus named the tribal people he encountered ‘Indians’ (Spanish: indios). The name stuck. More than a century on, European travellers, often fleeing religious persecution at home, established settlements in The New World at Jamestown in 1607, and later at Plymouth - the Pilgrim Fathers. From the start there was serious conflict with the indigenous ‘Indians’. Two very different cultures were on collision course.

So began more than two centuries of war-like strife between the technologically advanced white settlers (they had guns) and the Native Americans who relied on the bow and arrow, lance and knife: a long-lasting clash between Christians and what were perceived as heathens. The conflict deepened as a growing tide of European immigrants moved further and further west, grabbing land for cattle rearing, and farming, discovering oil, and seeking gold. The Wild West was created, and with it the literature of the western.

As a boy in the 1940s and 50s I devoured the cheap, luridly illustrated, pulp fiction paperbacks telling tales of tough cowboys battling against uncivilised Indians. Hollywood jumped aboard the bandwagon and the western movie became an industry in its own right. Roy Rogers and Trigger ruled the range.

Attitudes to this conflict were slow to change. Novels from Dee Brown’s Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee  (1970) and through to Peter Cozzens’ The Earth is Weeping (2016) set out to depict the history and the destruction of an indigenous culture from the Indian point of view, and how remorseless white expansionism amounted to nothing less than genocide. The celebrated American novelist Cormac MaCarthy (b. 1933) exemplifies this change of viewpoint, adding significantly to the western genre in a series of outstanding novels, of which Blood Meridian is the strongest.

Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, is a tumultuous fiction set around the emerging lawless townships, the stakeholders, and the isolated sod-buster homesteads of western Texas and the Mexican border region in the 1840s. Based on an actual body of disparate, desperate men who terrorised the area, the violent Glanton gang, McCarthy depicts the characters with a Dickens-like gift for their grubbiness and greed, their sleaze. We have Toadville (fugitive, branded face, no ears), Judge Holden (educated, completely hairless, given to philosophical utterances such as ‘War is God’), John Joel Glanton (criminal, gang leader), Grannyrat (criminal), Tobin (ex-priest), and principally an unnamed runaway child known through the book as the boy, then the kid, and finally the man. (The author used a similar literary device in his apocalyptic novel The Road where the main characters are the boy and the man.)

In Blood Meridian the boy escapes a squalid, poverty-stricken, abusive, violent background to become a homeless vagrant in the semi-lawless townships of west Texas where he falls in with the Glanton gang of criminals and fugitives. They earn a living by roving the country seeking out and attacking bands of marauding, vengeful Indians who have pillaged and fired homesteads, murdered, raped and kidnapped. The novel recounts numerous expeditions as the Glantons scour desert, plain, forest, and mountains, hunting Indians (often wearing stolen clothing as trophies) and engaging them in brutal, vicious fighting. The gang then scalp the dead, returning to the townships with the proof of their victories over the ‘savages’. Grateful townspeople welcome them as heroes and pay them in gold. There were then wild days when the drunken Glantons went crazy with debauchery and the smashing-up of property. Anti-social behaviour to the power of 10.

The vivid depiction of man’s violent inhumanity and degradation is but part of the story: Cormac McCarthy gives the reader a marvellous counterpoint through his stunning descriptions of landscape, weather, the night sky, sunrise and sunset. A high-quality lyrical creation of ‘place’. And running throughout, like a motif, are the descriptions of the country’s flora and fauna. It is a fine achievement to blend the blood-saturated brutality of the humans with the raw beauty of the natural world. The author makes it work, seamlessly.

In the end most of the Glanton gang suffer more than wounds from arrow and axe: comeuppance will out. Some die violently: others are hanged in public.

Cormac McCarthy has gifted a powerful and memorable book to the world. The book’s brief epilogue ends with the words ‘Then they all move on again’. It appears to indicate a continuum: and in the same way the townships continued to ‘move on’, to develop and expand long after the infamous Glantons had gone. Townships became cities. And while the Indian tribes and nations continued the fight to hold their lands and preserve their way of life they were eventually defeated at the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. It brought to a close the long-running Indian Wars. A culture that had developed from the days when those primitive hunter-gatherers crossed the Bering land bridge while the ice still held its grip, came to an abrupt halt. Its people were confined to designated Indian reservations. The warrior, the bow and arrow, the buffalo were gone. Scalping was over.

Blood Meridian is published by Picador.

RESERVOIR 13 by Jon McGregor, reviewed by Linda Newbery

A girl is missing. This trope has become altogether too familiar in recent years (and yes, I’ve used it myself, in Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon* - I’ll excuse myself by pointing out that I began it in 1997, rather than jumping on an already overloaded bandwagon). Jon McGregor’s novel begins with the disappearance of a thirteen-year-old girl from a Peak District village on a winter’s afternoon, but it’s not the crime novel you might expect from this opening and especially not one of those whose plot hangs on a startling twist.

The girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. She was looked for, everywhere. She was staying with her family in a village holiday let, and after her disappearance the parents return, intermittently and separately, the father sometimes behaving oddly enough to be treated as a suspect. Reservoir 13 is unusual in structure and style, spanning thirteen years, a chapter for each. We follow the lives of residents of this small village, location unspecified though with enough references to the Kinder Scout trespass, the well-dressing tradition, villages drowned beneath reservoirs and a crashed Lancaster bomber for us to place it in Derbyshire near the start of the Pennine Way. It’s unsettling at first that the viewpoint never settles on one or more main characters but circles around a great many, the focus often shifting within a paragraph from one character or group to another; but you get used to this, along with the brisk progression through the years. The omniscient narrative concerns itself almost as much with the yearly cycles of badgers, foxes, buzzards and goldcrests as with the human residents: In the beech wood the foxes gave birth, earthed down in the dark and wet with pain, the blind cubs pressing against their mother for warmth. I like to think that I’m fairly knowledgeable about wildlife, but had to look up “springtails”, which make frequent appearances.

McGregor uses short, often simple sentences, and dialogue is rendered without speech marks. To give the flavour of this: Inlets are probably clogged again, he said. Everything else all right? Yes, yes. Fine. He took out a pouch of tobacco and rolled a cigarette. She looked as though she had more to say. He nodded up at a bank of clouds over the moor, thickening. Weather, he said, and walked on. Mr Jones, she called after him. Will you let me get someone in? He stopped. It’s a decent boiler, he said. I’ll sort it. A goldcrest moved through the tall firs at the far end of the playground, picking quickly at the insects feeding between the needles. From the hills behind the allotments a thick band of rain was moving in.

McGregor plays with the reader’s expectations of what's happened to the missing teenager.Various possibilities are aired by the locals: there are old mine-shafts, locked-up cottages, a closely guarded boiler-house, and of course the several reservoirs, where the title and the number 13, which corresponds to the number of chapters, seem to be leading us. When walkers stray from the paths, children explore mine tunnels and the water-levels in the reservoirs sink to drought level, we anticipate a discovery; and James Broad, one of the group of teenagers who hung around with Rebecca, knows more than he’s told the police. In another novel these would be either clues or red herrings. But in many such novels the denouement, however carefully the ground is prepared, proves disappointing – the rug-snatching moment not enough for the reader to suspend disbelief. You won’t find that here, with the focus on the ordinary lives of the villagers and the rhythms of the seasons and of community life. Though still remembered, the mystery is in the background.

A woman moves to the village to escape from her violent husband. Teenagers grow up, go to university, return. Allotment crops thrive or fail. Relationships end, new ones develop. Pantomimes are staged each winter (yes, in some ways it’s like Ambridge); the parish council meets; words were had when someone offends. Social media arrives; contacts are made on Facebook; lambs are born, ewes lost in snowdrifts; there’s minor and more serious crime; a dairy farmer is forced by supermarket milk prices to the point of giving up. Many or even most of the characters' stories are characterised by disappointment and loneliness, adaptations and compromises. As the years pass and the missing girl fades into legend, we're reminded how old she would be now and how she might look.

A Guardian feature earlier this year explains that McGregor ‘wrote the book out of sequence, getting down all the scenes about individual families, and then all the lines about blackbirds, foxes, reservoirs and so on, storing the sections in a ring binder. “Then I went back and cut it all up and rearranged it. There was a point when it was purely collage.”’ At any point, he says, he was concerned with just one line. Perhaps that explains the sense of freshness and immediacy that gives this book its distinctive quality. There's something quite mesmerising in the telling; something seductive in the rhythms that reminds me of Cormac McCarthy.

Reservoir 13 is published by 4th Estate.

*published in paperback as Missing Rose, 2016