Meridian time

The shooting of Charlie Kirk could have come straight out of the pages of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. The question is, have we reached peak meridian or could the violence get bloodier still?

Is there a more apposite book for our violent times than Blood Meridian? Re-reading Cormac McCarthy’s blood-soaked nihilistic masterpiece, one cannot help but be struck by the parallels with the relentless bombardment of Gaza and Ukraine and the litany of senseless US school shootings.

And while Tyler Robinson, the suspect in the shooting of Charlie Kirk, visited a university campus rather than a school, his choice of weapon –– a .30-06-calibre, bolt-action Mauser Model 98 rifle – could have come straight from the pages of McCarthy’s novel.

Loosely based on the Mexican-American war of 1846-48, Blood Meridian follows a gang of murderous scalp hunters, known as the Glanton Gang, as they roam the US-Mexico borderlands killing Apaches and murdering innocent women and children. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a 14-year-old drifter referred to only as “the kid”, and the “judge”, a huge and hairless philosopher-cum-sociopath who excels in ingenious ways of killing. McCarthy’s novel is both a Dante-esque descent into hell and an unflinching depiction of human brutality. And by situating the action on the 100^th meridian – the line of longitude that separates the eastern United States from the arid plains to the west – McCarthy confronts the reader with uncomfortable questions about the divide between “civilization” and “savagery” and the strain of violence that runs through the American republic.

As you would expect in a McCarthy novel, the violence is cinematic, with much of it “filmed” in graphic close-up. Eyes are gouged with broken bottles, torsos are impaled on crudely fashioned lances and heads severed with bowie knives by the flickering light of desert camp fires. But McCarthy also excels at the long-range kill, as when having obliterated an Apache community camped on a lake bed in the Gila River region of what is now New Mexico and Arizona, Captain Glanton, who is based on the real-life outlaw John Joel Glanton, sets his sites on a group of Apache warriors a quarter mile distant.

Describing how, much as Kirk’s shooter probably did, Glanton steadies the rifle before taking aim, McCarthy writes:

He reckoned the drift of the wind and he reckoned against the sun on the side of the silver foresight and he held high and touched off the piece… the shot was flat and dead in the emptiness and the gray smoke drifted away. The leader of the group on the rise sat on his horse. Then he slowly pitched sideways and fell to the ground.

There is no evidence that Robinson, who according to the latest reports appears to have killed Kirk in protest at his vocal opposition to trans rights, was familiar with McCarthy’s oeuvre but a character similar to the judge features in Red Redemption 2, a 2018 video game from Rockstar Games, and it is possible that Robinson, a dedicated gamer, may have been familiar with the character.

Robinson’s choice of weapon – if indeed he is proven to be the shooter – is also McCarthyesque. Although the Mauser Model 98 does not have the speed of a semi-automatic rifle, like other bolt-action rifles it is considered more accurate and less prone to malfunctioning. Indeed, the National Rifle Association describes it as "the quintessential rifle action for military, hunting and target-shooting applications."

Though Blood Meridian was first published in 1985 – in other words, long before the culture wars currently roiling America – its themes also resonate with our present in other respects. Not least is the way that the violence depicted in the novel is mirrored by McCarthy’s deployment of arcane and offensive language . I counted five uses of the N-word in one paragraph alone. Women are either “whores” or “squaws”. The indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are either “Indians” or “savages", while the “Mexicans” would not be out of place in a spaghetti western. In other words, unlike other great American novels, such as Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby, Blood Meridian is unlikely to meet with the approval of American Studies departments steeped in progressive ideas about dehumanizing language and how offensive words can engender violence.

These debates also run through the response to Kirk’s shooting with some critics – principally those on the Left – arguing that, given Kirk’s well-documented racial slurs and denigration of trans women, it should come as no surprise that he was targetted for assassination. By contrast, Kirk’s defenders argue that in a society which values free speech, violence is never an appropriate response to words, no matter how insulting or injurious they may be to someone’s identify or sense of self.

Robinson appears to have been a member of the former camp. In text messages released by prosecutors on Tuesday in which he appears to confess to the shooting, he informs his romantic partner, who is in the process of transitioning to a woman: “I had enough of this hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out”.

Nor can it be negotiated out of McCarthy’s novel; it is written on every page and into every bullet.

Blood Meridian has long been considered unfilmable. Ridley Scott, James Franco, Tommy Lee Jones and Todd Field have all had a crack. It is not just the relentless nature of the violence or the litany of bloodied scalps and dead babies that makes it challenging to bring to the screen, it is the air of nihilism and helplessness that pervades the text. As Harry Readhead writes in Medium: “It is the sense we have that this is it, there is no relief, there is no goodness in the world.”

Now come reports that John Logan will adapt Blood Meridian into a feature film for the director John Hillcoat. The film comes with a posthumous executive producer credit for McCarthy, who before his death in 2023 spoke at length with Logan. I hope Logan and Hillcoat succeed. In these fraught meridian times, I would rather see the violence depicted in McCarthy’s novel play out in movie theatres than the streets. For following Kirk’s death, the sense of hopelessness that pervades Blood Meridian has become all-pervasive.

The question is whether in a world where hate is continuously being amplified by tweets and memes and the Trump administration seems determined to ratchet the tensions further, we have reached peak meridian? Or could the savagery rise to even bloodier heights?

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