Erin Dionne. Ollie and the Science of Treasure Hunting. New York: Penguin, 2014.

Ollie and the Science of Treasure Hunting is the second in a series of YA novels featuring a group of friends in the Boston area who solve mysteries. In the first installment, Ollie Truong helped solve the mystery of the paintings stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum—a work of fiction because, alas, they are still missing in 2015.

Ollie is told by the FBI to lay low for a while, so his parents suggest that he join some Wilderness Scouts as they camp on one of the Boston Harbor Islands. The Harbor Islands are now operated by the National Park Service, and apparently scout groups can camp there. In recent YA titles, no one seems to belong to the Boy Scouts any more. I am not sure if that is because they have become proprietary like the National Football League or if New York publishers consider them politically incorrect.

When I lived in the Boston area, the islands were off limits to the public. Now people may visit many of them (there are 34 in all) with permission. Ollie makes some new friends since this is not his own troop. Nearly every scout troop has its bully, and Derek is the one dedicated to making life miserable for Ollie.

Ollie, however, does get involved in an adventure. He, his new friend Chris, and the ranger’s daughter Grey discover an unusual hiding place on one of the other islands. Could this be pirate treasure? Will Derek mess it up for everyone?

The plot is not unlike those of Tony Abbot’s young adult adventures. Derek sounds a lot like Darren from Gordon Korman’s Swindle series. Ollie and the Science of Treasure Hunting does appeal to the imagination, and there is plenty of suspense and action. Author Dionne does are pretty good job of getting the setting down, though for some reason the ranger works for the National Parks Service, rather than Park Service. In her acknowledgments she credits Bob Stymeist, who is one the real experts when it comes to birds of Massachusetts.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. White Nights. 1848. [Included in the following]
———. Notes from Underground. Trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. 1864; New York: Signet, 1961. Print.

Three of the greatest novels ever written were written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. White Nights and Notes from Underground were earlier works and reveal something of the young writer. Neither is especially extraordinary, but the main character of both is an unnamed young loner who does not engage socially. In other words, precursors to Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment.

White Nights is a short story of about fifty pages. The best way to describe it is a tender, bittersweet love tale. We see the cute, perhaps awkward, beginning of a relationship. Our narrator is out walking on a summer night as he is accustomed to doing. He does not really relate to anyone else; he just observes the people on the street and keeps to himself. He sees a girl or young woman trying to get away from a man who is harassing her. He is able to rescue her, and they sit on a bench and begin to talk.

The nights are white in St. Petersburg in the summer. It is barely dark at midnight, so the night is twilit, “white,” not dark. It also suggest the purity of the nights. The story’s romantic conclusion reminds us of Tennyson’s “’Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.” (In Memoriam 27.15-16) Even though our unnamed narrator loses the girl, he is assured that she is happy, and he is happy to have gotten to know her.

Notes from Underground is a short novel. It was published in 1864, two years before Crime and Punishment, but it appears to have had a much earlier provenance. I confess that I almost gave up on it because the first few chapters nothing happens. The narrator mostly rants about how he is “underground” living by himself in a “mousehole” where he observes others, but no one notices him. He does challenge the reader to reconsider his beliefs, especially if he believes that things are getting better or that a utopia is possible. Perhaps someone like Raskolnikov is his audience.

Unlike the unnamed narrator in White Nights, we perhaps can understand why this twenty-four year old narrator (critics call him Underground Man) does not get along socially. He is terribly self-conscious, thinking a lot more about himself and worried what others think of him, though it is unlikely anyone does. He really does not like most people. He befriends a young professional woman but then insults and criticizes her so much, that she leaves him for good. He might be called what a “judgmental” person might say to Crime and Punishment‘s Sonia.

He did not like any of his classmates where he went to school, but he gets himself invited to one of his former classmates’ going away party. He gets himself obnoxiously drunk at the party, so that everyone else leaves and he is left behind. He thinks he knows which cathouse they are going to, but by the time he gets there they have disappeared.

There is little sympathy for this guy. At least Raskolnikov has some beliefs and in some way is a man of character. Our Underground Man is simply a loser. Indeed, as I got into the story, I could not help but think of Holden Caulfield, another misanthropic loser who gawks at everyone in the city but hates them and has his own experience with a prostitute. The narrator of Notes never actually called his former classmates or his co-workers “phonies,” but that may just have been the translation. If you want Catcher in the Rye in a nineteenth century Russian St. Petersburg setting, Notes from Underground may be just what you are looking for. It is almost miraculous that a mere two years after this juvenilia was published, Dostoyevsky broke the mold with Crime and Punishment.

Gordon Korman. Masterminds. New York: Harper, 2015. Print.

This is the absolute latest from our current favorite Young Adult (YA) writer. Gordon Korman did not come out with another Swindle book. There are no Great Danes, but there are some things that do remind us of Korman’s other works.

First, we do have a group of talented kids. In this case, though, none have special talents, merely some hobbies. There are no super hackers or rock climbers, although the kids in Masterminds do have to slightly different things with the Internet, and there is a break-in. It is not exactly a fish out of water story like Ungifted. It is more of a fish in weird water story, like the old joke about one fish asking another one, “What is water?”

Korman tells the story very well. Each chapter is narrated by one of five twelve and thirteen year olds who live in Serenity, New Mexico. It does not take too long to realize that this is some kind of Utopian experiment. There is no evil overlord, but the reader understands that there is a sense of unreality. The nearest town, Taos, is eighty miles away, and when the kids ride their bikes near the town line, they get mysteriously sick.

The population of Serenity is only 185, so everyone knows everyone else. The only employer is a plastics factory that makes orange traffic cones. But one of the kids observes that the trucks that are supposedly shipping the cones to customers around the country, really do not go anywhere. When they see the cones close up, they are covered with dust, and some have stains on them that make them individually recognizable, and those cones stay on the trucks for weeks though they are carried around on the trucks.

This Utopia apparently tries to make people nice. There are no contact sports. The wildest sport they play is water polo. The others are badminton and croquet. Their online history book tells them that the Boston Tea Party happened in 1773 when the British governors met with colonial leaders to discuss independence over tea. One of the kids discovers a different version of the story one evening when a thunderstorm knocks out the local network, and he picks up a wi-fi signal from somewhere else that connects him to the real Internet.

It is hard to call the story dystopian because Serenity is so pleasant. Still, the group of kids realize that something is amiss because one of their friends has to leave, ostensibly to care for his aging grandparents, but his parents stay in town. He leaves a note telling the others that he has leave Serenity because he is turning fourteen and that he is actually going to be attending a boarding school near Pueblo, Colorado.

And then there are the Purple People Eaters. That is what the school kids call the security people at the plastics factory. They wear purple uniforms, hence their nickname. There is no police force in town. Everyone knows everyone else and knows pretty much what everyone else is up to. The plastics factory security detail double as police, not that there is ever much need for them other than occasional responses to injuries or illness.

But the Purple People Eaters keep to themselves. They do not live in town. Indeed, no one in school knows their names—except that one is Mr. Delaney. The only reason they know his last name is that he recently married Mrs. Delaney, the water polo coach who just arrived in town newly wed.

Randy, the one who had to relocate to Colorado, secretly took pictures of all the known security people, gave them storybook names, and put their pictures on trading card parodies. He called them names like Rump L. Stiltskin, Alexander the Grape, and General Confusion.

Here is the card for Baron Vladimir von Horseteeth:

Born: 0.003 seconds after the Big Bang
Hobbies: Tearing heads off live chickens, flatulence, knitting
Goal: To win the Kentucky Derby
Major Accomplishment: Flossing
Favorite Foods: Hay, carrots, sugar cubes
Favorite Color: Thursday

In spite of its perhaps more serious plot, Korman still shows his sense of humor. The humor makes us like the kids, even when they get in trouble.

They are about to get in bigger trouble, though. What really does go on in the cone factory? Why are they literally out in the middle of nowhere? Why do the kids get sick when they even innocently try to go beyond the town line?

Korman still tells a good story. One warning: Masterminds is not the first book in a series like the Swindle series. This the first book in what may be a trilogy. In other words, the story is to be continued. And this review has hardly given away any of the plot—it really is complicated. Could it happen here?

Eugene O’Neill. Strange Interlude. O’Neill: Complete Plays 1920-1931. New York: Library of America, 1988. Print.

Some consider Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude one of his best works. After all, it won a Pulitzer Prize. Others consider it one of his magnificent flops—hard to produce and tough for an audience to take. Let me tell you, it truly does show O’Neill’s characterization and storytelling comparable to his best works.

The play is long. It is like reading a short novel. When produced, Strange Interlude took about 6 or 7 hours, so productions would take an intermission for dinner. I remember in the sixties a film version of War and Peace did something similar. The tricky part—actually easy enough to read—is that half the play is asides to the audience. Shakespeare has asides and soliloquies. Now imagine more than half the lines as asides. We know what the characters are really thinking as well as what they are saying.

The story focuses on four characters over a period of about twenty-five years. The beautiful and charming coed Nina is in mourning over Gordon, her fiancé who is killed in the Great War. Gordon was a handsome football player at Yale and a charmer himself. She marries Gordon’s best friend, Sam Evans, who admires her greatly but is not the macho man Gordon was.

As in many of O’Neill’s plays, the women are diabolical at heart. After their marriage, Sam’s mother frightens Nina with details of the family history. We never really know how much of what the elder Mrs. Evans says is true—though a doctor friend affirms part of it—but she does not like her daughter-in-law, and this is her way of making Nina miserable. Years later, Nina appears just as jealous of her son’s fiancée.

Without going into too much detail to spoil the story, Nina, like most women wants children but Sam is convinced that he is impotent. Nina has a child by a family friend, the detached scientist Ned Darrell, but she lets Sam believe the boy is his. We also learn that the scientist realizes that the detachment only works in theory.

Fairly early in the play Nina’s college professor father dies, and we learn that one of his former students, Charles Marsden, carries the torch for Nina. He is about fifteen years older than Nina who calls him Uncle Charlie. He makes a living as a novelist, and Nina sees him as her father’s surrogate. She sees her happiness dependent on all three men, and she ably exploits each of them.

Nina is reminiscent of Ruth Atkins Mayo from O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, who thinks she can go back and forth loving her husband Robert and his brother Andrew. Perhaps the archetype is Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw Linton who could not understand why both Edgar Linton and Heathcliff could not love her. As in so many of O’Neill’s plays, the women are the troublemakers.

O’Neill was fascinated with Greek drama. He often wrote his plays with the concept of the mask. In his Beyond the Horizon, Andrew and Robert admit to one another they are lying, but they put on the masks for everyone else. In Strange Interlude it is as if the characters are constantly putting on masks and then taking them off, not for each other but for the audience.

Like Beyond the Horizon or Long Day’s Journey into Night, one might argue that Strange Interlude is not a tragedy. The main characters mostly go on living. If anyone does die at the end, they appear to die happy. Still, it does remind us of the sense of life experienced by the writer of Ecclesiastes when he observes matters “under the sun.”

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. (Ecclesiastes 1:14)

This fascinating novel-type play works. In another review I quoted O’Neill on science and religion. In Strange Interlude, Nina tells us (and we can hear O’Neill himself in this):

I tried hard to pray to the modern science God. I thought of a million light years to a spiral nebula—one other universe among innumerable others. But how could that God care about our trifling misery of death-born-of-birth? I couldn’t believe in Him, and I wouldn’t if I could! I’d rather imitate His indifference and prove that I had one trait at least in common! (668, 669)

Here the science is in the foreground, and it clearly does not satisfy even the scientist. Still, because of O’Neill’s language in the play where Ned speaks of his study of cells, we cannot help looking at the characters the way the scientist sees them, as a collection of cells. I recall being told in biology classes, “A hen is an egg’s way of making another egg.” O’Neill suggests something similar, but to what purpose? So it goes on, but it is all merely existential as we search elusively for happiness.

“There was no profit under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 2:11)

Eugene O’Neill. The Hairy Ape. O’Neill: Complete Plays 1920-1931. New York: Library of America, 1988. Print.

The Hairy Ape was one of Eugene O’Neill’s early successes and helped establish him as a significant American dramatist. It is a little dated nowadays, but still has something to say to us. O’Neill wrote: “The playwright of today must dig at the roots of the sickness of the age as he feels it—the death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfactory new meaning to life.”

His first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, did exactly that. Full of Biblical imagery, it suggested that the Christian Messianic hope was futile. At the same time it also noted that science and a materialistic philosophy were not helpful either.

The Hairy Ape deals with another false hope of O’Neill’s day, socialistic reform. One could argue that socialism claims a foundation on science and materialism.. Keep in mind that this was produced in 1922 when Communism was a mere fledgling in Russia and German National Socialism was still a few years away.

The tough, muscular Yank stokes coal on a freighter. On one voyage the spoiled and sickly daughter of the owner of the ship comes aboard. She is interested in taking a tour of the ship, but she is repelled by the filth and raw habits of the stokers. Yank overhears her calling him a hairy ape. Yank never forgives her for this, and tries to get his revenge for this slight.

Yank’s plans are very primitive in one sense. All he knows is brute strength. He tries to get other stokers to join him, but they see no reason to. He joins the IWW, the most radical of the labor unions, hoping to take part in some of their anarchistic endeavors. He is so eager, though, they suspect he is some kind of informer.

We can guess that Yank is not going to turn out well. But he really expresses the futility of changing society when he encounters a genuine hairy ape. The upper class educated people seem to have adopted Darwin’s thesis that some people are closer to apes than to humans, and all we can look forward to is a naturalistic survival of the fittest.

Edith Hamilton. The Roman Way. 1932; New York: Norton, 1993. Print.

Best known today for her Mythology, Edith Hamilton wrote a number of books on ancient Greece and Rome. The Roman Way attempts to look at ancient Rome from the perspective of everyday Roman life. That, she discovers, is a challenge. Nearly all writing from Rome is military. Even though Julius Caesar wrote two books, he reveals virtually nothing about himself in them.

Hamilton takes a look at the few writings that perhaps reveal something of everyday life in Rome. She begins with Plautus, the oldest Roman whose non-military writings still exist. He lived in the republic during the Second Punic War, but his comedies tell us of a society in which slaves are considered human beings and husbands are not expected to be faithful to their wives. Terence notes that families are really ruled by a matriarch—something still part of the Italian way of life today. (N.B.: The linked article originally appeared elsewhere, in the Wall Street Journal, I believe.)

She notes that although European theater may have begun in Greece, its conventions begin with the Romans. Plautus’s plays, unlike the comedies of Aristophanes, are situational comedies based on dramatic irony. His Menaechmi is the source for Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Terence lived shortly after Plautus died. His comedies were more plot-driven and based on social relationships. Whether sitcoms or comedies of manners, these are the roots of our theater today.

The last days of the republic and beginning of the empire are noted by Cicero and Horace. While Cicero was a politician and a general, his letters and other writings give us a sense of life in the Rome of his day. Horace wrote of the simple country life, a theme of European poetry ever since. Horace’s poems about women seemed detached, but his descriptions of rural Italy are something else. His goal was to create an inner peace regardless of circumstances.

Catullus’s short life as portrayed in his poems was anything but detached. His poems plus what Cicero tells us, makes us understand that aristocratic Roman women were as free to be unfaithful as their husbands were. (So-called feminism is an upper class phenomenon.) Catullus became the model romantic (the root of the word is Rome, after all) who was all emotion, died young, and left a beautiful memory. His emotions appeared to rule him; peace depended on his lover’s favors.

Hamilton proves that the best writers of the early empire were romantic. Theater audiences were drawn more and more to spectacle rather than story or poetry. She compares Euripides’ detached Helen with Vergil’s lovestruck Dido. She notes that Rome was famous for two things: its law with greater emphasis on fairness and its engineering feats like roads, bridges, aqueducts, and coliseums. Its philosophies and religions were largely imported. “They were not interested in why, only in how.” (159)

Juvenal, a little later than Vergil, wrote bitter, sardonic satires. The Stoic Tacitus was a contemporary but wrote of noble virtues. Hamilton notes that it is hard to imagine Juvenal and Tacitus were describing the same place and time. Seneca and Livy were also “all emotion.” But Seneca’s best work is far more moving in its language.

Hamilton, writing in 1932, sounds a bit like a fascist or communist of that era. She says that “history repeats itself” and that Rome disintegrated because the old virtues of the republic were inadequate for a world-wide empire, though Augustus tried.

Our mechanical and industrial age is the only material achievement that can be compared to Rome’s during the two thousand years in between. It is worth our while to perceive that the final reason for Rome’s defeat was the failure of mind and spirit to rise to a new and great opportunity, to meet the challenge of new and great events. (203)

Perhaps the classical ended, but the Byzantine empire kept things going until the rise of Islam, which has mostly been derivative. How “dark” were the Dark Ages, after all? It is still the West that the rest of the world is trying to keep up with or to destroy out of jealousy.

Philip K. Dick. The Man in the High Castle. New York: Putnam, 1962. Print.

Let me tell you why I read The Man in the High Castle. I teach Henry IV Part 1 in my Shakespeare class. The play portrays an unsuccessful rebellion against King Henry IV of England led by three men: the Earl of Northumberland, who holds sway in the North of England; Owen Glendower, guerilla leader of a movement to make Wales independent; and Edmund Mortimer, who claims that he (or his nephew) is the legitimate heir to the throne.

There is a scene where these three parties take a map of Britain and discuss how they will divide England into three smaller countries if they succeed. I try to have my class imagine how shocking this would be to Shakespeare’s English audiences—cutting up the motherland in thirds! I tell them how I remember when I was a kid in the sixties there was a book that imagined what things would have been like if the Axis powers had won World War II. A friend of mine had it. The cover was a picture of the 48 contiguous United States with a rising sun on the Western half of the map and a swastika on the Eastern half. Wow! I remember thinking, that might have happened! It was a scary thought.

As I was preparing the class this year, I happened to wonder what the book was. I only saw the cover of this paperback once or twice fifty years ago and had no idea of the book’s title. I did a web search on books of World War II alternate history. Nearly all the alternate history books have been written within the last twenty years. For a few years it was a kind of fad like the horror mash-ups are now.

I remember reading one fascinating essay based on Confederate records on what might have happened if the Confederacy had succeeded in seceding. I picked up a novel based on a similar premise, but I honestly found it too confusing and never finished it. The novel was clever, I suppose, but I felt as if I was reading something by the Shaaras if they had converted to Gnosticism. It was too weird.

I found one book in my search from the sixties, and the author was, of all people, Philip K. Dick. None of the book covers on Amazon had the map that I remembered, but his The Man in the High Castle surely sounded like a possibility. Virtually everything I had read by Dick was straight science fiction with robots, space travel, or weird mind control. He is best known today for films based on his stories such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report. I have since learned that the BBC came out with a TV version of The Man in the High Castle this year.

It happens that a new teacher at our school is a comic collector. Recently he mentioned that he collected Sci-Fi books as well. I asked him about The Man in the High Castle with the cover I described. He knew exactly what I was talking about and scanned the cover for me so I could show it to my class. After going through all that, I had to read the book.
The hardcover I got from the local library had a different jacket design, but the story has aged pretty well. Although the book was in the library’s Science Fiction section, The Man in the High Castle is not Sci-Fi. Dick himself may have been frustrated with this pigeonholing of his work. Three people in the novel are discussing a popular book which itself a work of alternate history. One reader named Paul calls it an “interesting form of fiction possibly within the genre of science fiction.” He immediately is challenged:

“Oh no,” Betty disagreed. “No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise” (91)

They are discussing a book which has become popular in the Japanese-controlled part of North America. It is banned in the German-controlled Eastern States of America. This imaginary novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, speculates what would have happened if the Allies had won the war instead of the Axis—a kind of alternate history within an alternate history.

Most of The Man in the High Castle is set in San Francisco, now a part of the Japanese Empire’s Pacific States of America (PSA). Some of the story takes place in Colorado and Wyoming which belong to Japan’s Rocky Mountain States of America. The Axis powers won because of German rocket technology and their development of the hydrogen bomb.

The Japanese rule their realms somewhat benevolently, at least for white Americans. While all the top government and business positions are held by Japanese, white Americans are respected for their creativity and history. Chinese are servants and laborers, like the coolies during World War II. Surviving Negroes are often slaves.

Germany has been more ruthless in its conquests. Jews are exterminated. One character in San Francisco is a New York Jew who settled there after the war ended in 1947 before they could round him up. The Germans have bombed most of the continent of Africa to eliminate blacks there. They are in the process of the exterminating the remaining blacks in their North and South American territories. They were in the process of exterminating all the European Slavs but decided to allow those that remained to resettle in their Central Asian “homeland.”

Germany has the rocket expertise and has landed on the moon and is making plans to go to Mars. One popular joke told by comedian Bob Hope is that the Germans will land on Mars and find that the planet is inhabited by Jews! The book notes that most American comedians were Jewish and have been killed. Commercial passenger rockets can fly between Germany and California in less than an hour.

But this is all incidental. The story involves a number of characters whose lives overlap in casual ways but together tell a pointed story.

It is now 1962. The current German führer Martin Bormann has died, and there is an internal struggle to see who will rule the German half of the world. Will it be Goebbels? Göring? Heydrich? or perhaps a dark horse? It also appears that just as Hitler double-crossed the Soviets in 1941, the 1962 Germans were thinking of double-crossing the Japanese.

A Swedish businessman who has gotten wind of the plot has rocketed to San Francisco to try to warn the appropriate Japanese army authority who himself is taking a boat across the Pacific to get there. Meanwhile German agents are trying to assassinate the Swede before he can make contact. When a Japanese official speaks to the businessman in Swedish and gets no response, the Japanese begin to wonder who he really is.

Most of the people in the story are not political figures. Since Western North America is now ruled by Asians, the country now reflects a more Asian culture than before. Many Americans consult the I Ching for guidance. There is the antiques dealer whose clients include wealthy Japanese. The New York Jew mentioned earlier is now an antiques salesman who discovers that one of his trusted sources is a forger. His divorced wife in Colorado is making arrangements to visit the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy who lives in Wyoming. The mid-level Japanese bureaucrat who is arranging the meeting between the Swede and the Japanese general has no idea that the meeting is about the German double-cross.

The actual man in the high castle is neither a Bavarian Nazi nor a Japanese secret policeman, but Abendsen (“evening son” or “eve’s son”), the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Although he lives in relative safety in Japanese-controlled Wyoming, an Italian assassin is trying to silence him as well.

Abendsen makes some clever observations about the nature of victory in war as Dick suggests there is more to life than meets the eye. Is life fated as both the I Ching and the “scientific” German and Japanese determinists believe? The discovery of the true theme that the man in the high castle reveals is ironic, clever, and makes a satisfying ending to the story. Though alternate history, The Man in the High Castle is not gnostic.

Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print.

I do not read many westerns. I have really enjoyed some that I have read, they simply do not come into my view very often. When I was younger I liked Larry McMurtry—his stories rang true at the time. Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage was great, and I can see why it became a classic. But I had never read Cormac McCarthy, even though he is western writer who is taken seriously in academic circles. I had felt that as an Advanced Placement reader and teacher I ought to read something by him, but there was always something else. I finally got around to reading McCarthy with Blood Meridian.

I would never have any intention of reading Fifty Shades of Grey. From what I have heard and read about it, the main character is a Mr. Grey and the book gets its title because he is involved in fifty sex acts. Blood Meridian has no sex other than possibly some vague innuendo and a few descriptions of animals breeding. Instead, it has multiple scenes of violence. It could be called A Hundred Ways of Bleeding. Even at the end when the main character has eschewed violence, it still rears its ugly ursine head.

I confess to using the cliche that a book bleeds because the author’s pain seeps through its pages. I believe I wrote that of Infinite Jest, and have sensed that with nearly everything I have read by Virginia Woolf. Blood Meridian also bleeds. The narrator is very detached, there is no voice of pain from the narrator except possibly in a few lectures or sermons given by the character called the judge. No, Blood Meridian bleeds because some people or other poor creatures are killed on nearly every page.

The story follows an orphan from Tennessee who ends up in Texas of the 1850s where he joins a band of filibusters. A few of this gang are veterans of the Mexican War, others are wanderers or misfits of various types. There are even a couple of Delaware Indians, misplaced and displaced warriors who no longer fit in anywhere. Ostensibly, these riders are going after a group of Apache Indians who have laid waste to about 10,000 square miles of Mexican Territory in Sonora and Chihuahua States. They do collect the scalps of a number of Apaches and are paid by the Mexican government, but they also kill a lot of other people and obliterate peaceful villages and encampments, and continue to do so after collecting their bounty.

McCarthy’s style takes some getting used to. He does not use apostrophes or quotation marks, so dialogue is tricky to read. Otherwise, he writes with style and precision. His descriptions are especially effective. The barren deserts and lava fields of the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest are not merely hot and dry. He has an eye for nature—the geology, the flora, and the fauna, from blossoms of sulfur to giant condors. We can picture these things well. From my limited experience in the Southwest, his description of the sand dunes around Yuma still apply today.

We never learn the main character’s name. He is simply the kid. The recognized leader of the men at their peak is a ruthless ex-veteran named Glanton, who is based on a historical character. In many ways, though, the spiritual or philosophical leader is a pale, hairless hulk they call the judge. We first see him in Texas when he accuses a revival evangelist of raping girls and the audience turns on the preacher. We suspect later that Judge Holden (we learn his last name) is himself the pedophile.

The judge supposedly originally had twelve followers as a kind of antichrist or devil figure. He speaks at least five languages and cleverly quotes the law to blame others and escape blame himself, though he is as violent and ruthless as the rest. He indeed is the diabolos, the accuser. (See Revelation 12:10) The last we see him, he is dancing naked with drunkards and prostitutes urging them on and boasting like some kind of mad ritual or danse macabre.

There are other allusions to the Bible, but they are turned violent or somehow twisted. For example, we see Psalm 137:9 acted out. People and animals regularly die in churches. The judge mocks the Bible. He has read Lyell and believes that the earth is much older than the Bible says and that there is no meaning or purpose to life. And if there is a purpose, it is all fate put into motion by blind physical forces. (The antichrist in Daniel 11:38 KJV is said to worship a god of forces.) Either way, there is no moral accountability.

There is no real redemption here. At the end, the kid, now a man, only kills in self-defense. He is still a loner and drifter—but in the very naturalistic world of Blood Meridian we all are. Echoing Brecht, we are lost in the stars. Life is nasty, brutish, and short. It is survival of the wickedest. “War is god,” says the judge. Nature is at best indifferent but usually hostile. And man is the beastliest of them all.