Book Review: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The first thing I will say about Blood Meridian is that I’ve never read anything like it. That’s both a positive and a negative. My faith in humanity, and probably my mental state, would be severely compromised if every book I read chronicled depravity to this extent. Then again, there are few who write a better sentence than Cormac McCarthy. The precision and the intention of his language is something to marvel at. As is the way he piles images and actions on top of one another to build a bludgeoning rhythm that is every bit as ruthless as the murderous gang the novel tracks.

The story, insofar as there is one, follows a teenager from Tennessee with a thirst for violence who makes a lone and listless journey across the mid-19th century Wild West. If you like character arcs and development, this is not the book for you. The nameless protagonist, referred to throughout as ‘the kid’, is an observer almost as frequently as he is a participant in the events that unfold. McCarthy is relentlessly focused on the imagery and the dialogue between the many forces that clash throughout the story and, to this end, internal monologues are omitted. All we know about the kid we learn through his actions and his words, not his thoughts. Given so much of what goes on around him is unmistakably terrible, this is a much more interesting and mysterious choice. This is a story in which we see dead babies hanging from trees, whole Indian tribes being shot ruthlessly in seconds, and the mentally handicapped caged and leashed.

While we in the 21st century are far from angels, the savagery and brutality from a period less than 200 years ago is nonetheless a reminder of how far civilization has moved forward and of the sort of worlds modern humanity has emerged from. McCarthy does not comment on it but merely presents it, and that is where the novel’s poignancy lies.

The standard bearer for the novel’s dim view of the human psyche is its anti-hero, Judge Holden, a loquacious, learned maestro who is the de facto leader of the gang the kid spends most of the story with. The Glanton gang, as they are known, spend their time routing Aboriginal tribes and earning what they can for their scalps. The violence is punctuated by monologues from the judge in which he opines in various ways that human beings are animals and any attempts to deny their base instincts are an exercise in futility. To Holden, a man is his need and his will and nothing more. With such a worldview, the murderous actions of he and the rest of the gang, in addition to their post-spoil debauchery, can be reframed as natural and above the need for apology. At nearly seven feet tall, the judge is always the most imposing person in any scene as well as the most charismatic. This means challengers to his worldview are few, with the kid being one of the few dissidents. Although having lived a baseless existence himself, the kid lacks the intellectual heft to truly confront the judge.

Holden is in many ways a judge of humanity, and his verdict is loud and clear. There is more than a hint of Satanism about the way he pushes men towards their worst instincts. But what Blood Meridian asks you is how much of a push do they really need?

When thinking of real-life contemporaries to the judge, I didn’t have to ponder things for too long. The influencers who espouse wisdom across the depraved stretches of the internet known as ‘the manosphere’ came to mind. Here, men who can outwardly display competency in some way push lost souls towards often toxic ideas centering around violence, self-preservation, and personal gain. But again, as McCarthy seemed to wonder, are the afflicted individuals truly in need of a push? Or is the faintest of nudges sufficient?

Review: The Social Reckoning

The Social Reckoning is here and people hate it. In some respects, this is understandable. A follow-up to arguably the best film of the 21st century was always going to command high expectations. With three A- listers heading up the cast and Aaron Sorkin providing the script, such high hopes seemed legitimate. They do go unmet, but The Social Reckoning’s failure is more due to the limitations of its story than any crimes against filmmaking.

The Social Network was a deliciously juicy story about friendship, betrayal and power. One that has only grown more portentous as the years have passed and its technological subject matter has altered media, culture and social interactions so inexorably. The Social Reckoning, by contrast, just doesn’t haven’t that same weight behind it. It is about a data scientist, who once liked, and worked, for Facebook (or Meta as they now call themselves), realised they were shitty, and blew the whistle on them. That’s pretty much it. What’s more, the catalyst for the protagonist’s change of heart: that Facebook’s algorithms promote toxicity and gravitate users towards extremist groups, is, while disconcerting, hardly revelatory information.

The propensity of algorithms to promote outrageous content and dangle clickbait before its faceless sea of scrollers is something that near enough anyone with a smart phone is aware of at this point. They’re flooded with the real-life evidence every day. I keep my Youtube algorithm clean, but it still throws the odd nutjob shrieking into the void at me if I’m not careful. The film does add that Facebook chose deliberately to ignore this in favour of the greater engagement and profitability that ragebait brings. This may be news to some. But again, to most, this will hardly be shocking. Revealing a billion-dollar tech company doesn’t care much about the average joe, feels a bit like saying Vladimir Putin probably isn’t the cuddliest of individuals. Yet the algorithm and Facebook’s response to it are the film’s two big reveals.

It’s not that these aren’t concerning realities. But we’ve all been swimming in the Meta-built sewer for far too long to be shocked at this point.

The performances from the triumvirate of stars on the poster don’t collectively land either. Mikey Madison does a solid job and shows her range as she goes from a brazen, vulgar-mouthed sex worker in Anora to an introverted data nerd in this outing. Jeremy Allen White gives a paint by numbers performance that does little more than the bare minimum. And Jeremy Strong’s Mark Zuckerberg seems like little more than Kendall Roy with a worse haircut.

It’s not that anything in this film is terrible. It’s functional and mildly engaging. I wasn’t clock-watching at any point. But following up The Social Network with this unspectacular and unrevelatory effort feels a little like sending the local street busker on stage after Oasis have just played a three-hour set.

The only really clumsy element of this film is its ending. Upon exposing her former employers, Mikey Madison’s character gives a triumphant fist pump. You’re supposed to see it and think “fuck yeah, they did it!” But as you’re watching, Meta algorithms are simultaneously pumping out AI slop out to millions quicker than you can say ‘brainrot’. 

Book Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ tells of a parentless caste society in which the supposedly civilised human beings are hatched and conditioned to love whatever labour is required of them. Their non-labour time allows them to partake in unfettered consumption, in which sex, devoid of subsequent connection between partners, is freely available. This prospect is made all the more enticing by society’s dedication to ensuring all civilised members remain artificially youthful and attractive in appearance. And if ever a moment of descension occurs to one of society’s oh-so-willing participants, they can simply eliminate their discomfort with a hefty dose of ‘soma’, a drug that will send them into a deep, gratifying stupor.

All those not part of this supposedly utopian caste system, are labelled savages and their contrasting lifestyle is revealed when dissident Bernard Marx visits their dedicated ‘Savage Reservation’. There he finds a decrepit mother living in squalid conditions with her young adult son, the pair of them holding outlandish beliefs in concepts of love and religion.

Savage John, despite the perennial squalor he has existed in, is found to be more virtuous than the supposedly civilised, who scoff at the idea of family and love, their own scope for dangerous activities such as free thought eliminated by their enduring state of consumption.

Reading this warning of the dangers of allowing science and technology to dominate life was particularly harrowing in 2024. Every promising student is now advised to pursue a STEM subject, as it is in those areas where the best jobs will be. The idea that a bright student in 2024 would opt to study a humanities degree would be regarded by many as an act of self-harm. In the UK, the former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak went on record about his desire to tackle the scourge of ‘rip-off degrees’ that don’t lead to secure employment and also hammered home the importance of students excelling in maths. While it is perfectly rational to choose a degree based on its career prospects, the notion that every talented student should do this is concerning. What will a world in which all our brightest minds are funnelled in fintech, computer programming and engineering be like to live in? While the latter two have undoubtedly changed our world, they do not provide meaning and joy in the way that art can. No-one ever streamed their favourite film and became moved to tears at the thought of the platform’s compression algorithm; no one ever drove a car through the mountains and found themselves awestruck by the smoothness of the transmission; and no one ever listened to their favourite piece of music and sang out their love of Bluetooth speaker connectivity at the chorus. I concede that there may be some extremely nerdy exceptions to such rules, but my point is that a world devoid of new and engaging art, revolving solely around science and technology is well… rather dystopian. And that worryingly is where we are seemingly headed.

Then there are the practices of our world’s dominant tech companies, which don’t exactly scream: here comes a bright, warm, and comfortable future for all. Google was not long ago declared to have an illegal monopoly; the horror stories of Amazon warehouse workers being sacked for taking toilet breaks are well-known; and Meta, despite its claims of innocence, has taken a seemingly liberal approach to its possession of user data over the years. Big tech’s next big idea is artificial intelligence, not an unwelcome technology if leveraged correctly to minimise human toil and create abundance, but something tells me monopolistic tech companies are unlikely to deploy AI with such benevolence.  

For all the troubling scientific and technological practices that are undertaken in our current world, we have at least not yet reached the nadir of growing and conditioning our children via shock therapy as infants. Nonetheless, two aspects of Huxley’s dystopia seemed, if not entirely true to our currently reality, chillingly close to it.

The desirable upper echelons of the Brave New World’s Caste system are predicated on ageless, consistent beauty in abundance and a perpetual state of consumption. In our own rather disturbing new world, these two principles are deeply entrenched in the world’s most popular social media apps. Beauty brings the eyeballs, the followers, the (tries not to throw up as typing) clout, and is therefore paid to flog the products for the masses to consume. Similarly, those who by weight of numbers have confirmed themselves to be beautiful depict their life as an endless stream of consumption, featuring all the holidays, clothes, meals and drinks at fancy restaurants and bars one could wish for. This, so they claim to their followers, is the life of dreams: endless, limitless consumption. So why would anyone watching not want to be beautiful? The inextricable link between beauty and consumerism big tech has created is enough to make one wonder if there is in fact a Huxleyesque Director figure co-ordinating the whole thing.

So in our own new world, beauty and resultant wealth, above all else, are the goals. More specifically, a particular vision of beauty thrust front and centre by the algorithms. Women must have flawless faces, full lips and a curvaceous body akin those of the Kardashian Clan, while men must preferably be built like the incredible hulk minus the greenness and have the facial profile of Brad Pitt. It is also customary for both to have phosphorescent white teeth that no human in existence has ever been naturally born with. This is where science comes in, for if one is not born like the digital kings and queens of clout, then with enough money they can pay to remove all signs of aging and ugliness and join the royals themselves. Women flat in the chest, meagre in the rump and thin in their lips can have the relevant zones suitably inflated; and men who have spent six days a week in the gym for five years and eaten near unconsumable numbers of chicken breast can turbocharge their in-flesh and online gains with a few strategic injections. Once every pixel of an image is delivered exactly to the algorithm’s liking, it will be pushed to the masses, at which point the gates to the promised land of limitless consumption will swing open for the newly beautiful, while their followers look on in wonder, unknowingly commencing the following cycle of aesthetics doping. While the pursuit of beauty is something that was not invented by social media, the ideal male and female aesthetic that the biggest apps project is now so far removed from a naturally attainable appearance for most that the thought of what people may be willing to do to themselves to achieve a potentially even more narrow and extreme look in a few years is genuinely worrying.

Personally, I think I’d rather remain an ugly, aging savage and not place the entire value of my existence on my physical appearance and the lavishness of my consumption habit. Sadly, I feel as though increasingly few people agree with me.

Film Review: Elvis

Despite living in an age where monikers such as ‘icon’ and ‘legend’ are dished out clumsily to often unworthy recipients, one can attach such titles to the subject of Baz Luhrmann’s latest film without fearing they too have adopted the hyperbolic tendencies of their contemporaries. Elvis is a not unfamiliar tale of rise and fall told through the eyes not of the man himself, but his manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), in a comparable fashion to the way in which Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway told the story of the title character in Luhrmann’s 2013 film, The Great Gatsby.

While Luhrmann’s narrator in Gatsby spoke of the film’s subject in awe and curiosity, Colonel Parker is a markedly more nefarious presence, a man who immediately views Elvis as a walking gold mine, a precious resource from which every last ounce of profit must be extracted while the going is good. Predictably, such an attitude cannot coexist with a healthy regard for a person’s wellbeing and while Parker’s laser-focused approach propels Elvis to superstardom and astronomical levels of wealth, it also turns out to be his ruin. Manipulated by Parker into shunning a world tour and taking up a five-year Las Vegas residency, Elvis finds himself trapped; a man who for all his talent, fame, and fortune, is at the mercy of his boss, with little more autonomy than he had in his days as a truck driver, prior to fame. And it is only when he tries desperately to reclaim ownership of his life as everything is crumbling around him that he realises the full extent of Parker’s treachery.

It is an all too familiar story of a generational talent being used and exploited by the morally bankrupt in the name of profit. A story that tells of the joy and beauty of talent and the heartlessness of the business that surrounds its management. 45 years on from Elvis’ death, one would like to think the practices of those involved in talent management have changed. But one look at how human beings have continued to exploit at every possible opportunity in the intervening years, with our treatment of the natural world being a case in point, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which the latest emerging superstar within the music industry isn’t simply viewed by the dealmakers as the ripest fruit on the talent tree, ready to be picked and squeezed for all it is worth.

Portraying the destructive nature of a profit first, consequences second approach, the film’s release in the midst of an ever-worsening climate crisis seems apt.     

Film Review: Born On The Fourth Of July

In this year that has reminded us all of the devastating consequences of war, we find ourselves inundated with numbers concerning the dead or wounded on a daily basis. While wars inevitably reduce those involved to statistics, the consequences for the individuals harmed and those around them can never be understated. Born On The Fourth Of July, the film adaptation of the harrowing true story of Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic serves as an emphatic reminder of the irrevocable destruction that war can inflict on the life of an individual.

A teenager who excels both in the sporting and social arena, Ron (played by Tom Cruise) appears to have a wonderful future in front of him. But he is also wedded to the institution of the United States. Placing his faith in its core tenets of patriotism and Christianity, he is determined to ‘stop the communists from taking over.’ And it is these values, which Ron has at no point willingly acquired but been born into,  that ultimately shape his future for the worst. For after signing up for Vietnam, Ron soon finds himself back on American soil and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Attempting to cope with the impact of PTSD, the reactions of those around him upon his return, changing domestic attitudes towards the war, and his own irreversible limitations, Ron is enveloped by frustration, rage, and hopelessness leading him into sordid environments from which there appears to be no return to the wholesome sun-filled days that once comprised his life. But through all of the pain he endures, one thing becomes very apparent to Ron: he and many other young men were sent to war for no good reason, only to either never return or return with their life quality diminished beyond recognition. But in the darkness of his reality, Ron finds purpose and subsequently makes it his mission to speak out against the ills of war, in order to protect future generations from all that he has suffered.

Watching Ron’s often horrifying story play out, I was hit with the sad realisation that there will, unfortunately, be many other Ron Kovics in the world today: young men seeking their way in life taken in by some grandiose tale about victory over evil forces threatening to ruin the world, only to find themselves standing on the side of tyranny on the battlefield. How many of those in the Russian forces I wonder, not necessarily through their own personal failings but as a result of the conditions they have lived in, take the view that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is justified? Sadly, nearly half a century on from the end of the Vietnam War, there are still young impressionable men being sent out as cannon fodder, mere pieces on a chessboard to the powers that command them.               

Book Review: Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

When consulting my bookshelf recently I decided that the time had come to re-read Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, as my initial memories of the novel having first read it more than six years ago were hazy and my main take away from watching the film as a teenager had been: ‘wouldn’t it be great to have a body like Brad Pitt?’ Having tried and failed in the latter respect in my early twenties, I re-calibrated my expectations and set myself the more realistic target of obtaining a greater understanding of the source material.

My instincts that Fight Club was worthy of being re-read proved to be correct as what I found was a book that, despite being more than twenty years old, appeared to be addressing issues still very much a part of contemporary society.

The novel’s unnamed narrator and protagonist finds himself as many people today do, in a ‘bullshit job’ which delivers comfortable pay but no fulfilment, a situation that the character has attempted to navigate through consumerism. Unsurprisingly however, the horde of commodities the character has amassed has ultimately failed to deliver the meaning that he seeks, effectively reducing him to a grown-up boy trapped in an endless cycle of meaningless work to fund the purchase of his next toy for his condominium.

The character’s rejection of his plight and attempts to reclaim his long-departed masculinity lead him on a destructive path which grows darker and darker as the story progresses. In my eyes, the book is a vicious attack on consumerism and the idea – one that many marketers take great pleasure in peddling – that if we simply have enough money to buy ourselves enough stuff, all our problems will fade away. Fight Club provides an alarming example of the ills that can befall a person who misguidedly places in their faith in the totem of material wealth.    

Book Review: Moneyball By Michael Lewis

Several years after purchasing the book, I finally decided to read Moneyball. Although familiar with the popular meaning of the term and in possession of vague memories of an early 2010s film starring Brad Pitt, something had always kept me from it. On reflection, I suppose I had a pre-conceived idea of what the book would be like based on its central idea: that a cash-strapped Major League Baseball team, through the adoption of a data-informed approach to player recruitment, could outperform its wealthier rivals. I imagined myself choking on statistics and reading equations spanning several lines. In other words, I thought Moneyball would be no fun at all. Its greatest triumph is that it knocks this particular assumption, as baseball fans would say: ‘out of the park’.

The book reads like a novel and every baseball term and statistic is skilfully woven into the story of the characters that were pivotal to the instigation of arguably the most transformative experiment undertaken in modern sporting times. Top of the list of those involved is Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A’s, a compulsive, obsessive and anger-prone former baseball player, who happens to be the perfect captain of a ship that according to the tobacco-chewing, cliché-loving baseball commentariat is on a one-way voyage to oblivion. Once the most sought-after baseball prodigy in America, Beane, having been earmarked for greatness by scouts, endured an underwhelming professional career despite all of the game’s supposed experts endorsements. With the help of Havard Economics graduate Paul DePodesta, Beane is subsequently able to cut through the scouting tropes that incorrectly singled him (and many other young baseball players after him) out as future stars and build a revolutionary data-led method of constructing a team in which player selections are informed not by whether a player will look good fronting an ad campaign, but the statistical merits of their sporting performance.

Living in today’s world, this may be appear as little more than common sense, but given that Beane’s experiment was undertaken during the turn of the last millennium and ran into the early noughties, a time when technology was much more primitive, there is little doubt that he and his team’s work was at the time, ground breaking. As the approach unsurprisingly begins to bear fruit, details of the baseball scouting fraternity’s attempts to dispel it are relayed. Here the desperation and denial of a previously unchallenged ‘old boys club’ accustomed to justifying their endorsement of a player simply by spouting a few aphorisms as sagely as possible is laid bare and provides unrelenting tension throughout the book. Billy Beane and his team know that the earth is round, but no matter how loud they shout it and how many photos they show, the baseball establishment just will not listen.

The lines are drawn. Beane et al are the innovators and the rest of baseball world are burying their heads in the sand. Moneyball good. Baseball bad. But is it as simple as that? Personally, I didn’t think that it was. Clearly Beane and his team are pioneers in one sense, but are they pioneers for the better? There are several mentions of Wall Street in the book and at certain points Beane is described as buying and selling players as though they are little more than shares in a company. For me this left a sour taste, not with Beane or the sport of baseball in particular, but for the way in which capitalism has managed to slyly interweave itself with all of the world’s most popular sports. Players are not sentient breathing beings, they are commodities to be bought and sold at will in the pursuit of sporting success and to hell with the real-life consequences. Beane is simply a stockbroker who managed to ‘short’ conventional market wisdom.

Rating: 4/5 While I’m not sure Moneyball is altogether a good thing for the world of sport, this was by far the most engaging sports book I’ve ever read.  

Book Review: Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck

After recently re-reading J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, I decided, when faced with another otherwise unfilled day in lockdown, to revisit another 20th century classic and one of all my all-time favourites, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men. A novella revolving around little and large migrant ranch workers George Milton and Lennie Small, it is a story that examines both friendship and loneliness.

My overriding memory from my initial reading several years previously was the point the relationship of the two central characters made about how friendship can often be driven by compromise, with an imperfect relationship generally considered to be preferable to loneliness. This is illustrated through George’s willingness to tolerate the frequent gaffes of his well-intentioned but bumbling friend, despite the trouble that Lennie’s faux pas regularly land the duo in.

As I read the Of Mice And Men for the second time however, my attention was drawn not to the two main characters, but one of the secondary figures in the story, Curley’s wife. Married to the ranch owner’s ill-tempered son, Curley’s wife’s arrangement has effectively stripped her of her own identity, rendering her merely an extension of her husband, something that is emphasised by the fact that her actual name is never revealed. Expected to stay in the house like a supposedly ‘good wife’, she seeks companionship with the ranch workers, most of whom shun her advances due to their own fear of her husband’s reaction. This leaves her alone and devoid of any hope in her future. Worse still, her rejected attempts to interact with the workers result in her being labelled ‘a tart’ who should remain in her husband’s house. I found the hopelessness of this character’s reality truly horrifying, especially when I considered that despite this story being more than 80 years old, there are still so many women in the world treated as little more than the property of their spouse. These women face the wretched dichotomy of either spending their entire life in a suffocating relationship or potentially being shunned by their social circle should they attempt to sever the ties restraining them.

Like much of Steinbeck’s work, Of Mice and Men is focused on oppressive institutions and their ruthless propensity to strip ordinary people of the most basic elements of the human experience. Curley’s wife’s marriage is just one of many examples of this, but that doesn’t it make any less impactful.

Rating: 4.5/5 A bonafide classic that can be easily read in a day.      

Book Review: Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

A story of two friends who make a euthanasia pact following the death of a woman they have both loved, Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam revolves around the selfish actions of the two men in the aftermath of bereavement.

Both characters Clive, a composer intent on writing his magnum opus symphony, and Vernon, the editor of a flagging newspaper, attempt to stay busy following the death and throw themselves back into their respective professions. This presents both of them with opportunities in which they elect to serve their own interests as opposed to those of others. In both instances their choices backfire, but far from leading to reformation, both outcomes serve only to cement them in their selfish ways. There is once again however, consequences and these are borne out in shocking fashion in the book’s final pages.

Probably the most chilling thing about this story is that both characters are completely believable, and this realisation prompts one to ponder how many untold stories there are in the world of the sort of callousness that both characters embody. One feels that their mentalities are linked intrinsically to their careers and this may have a lot to with their believability, for in a contemporary society that champions individual achievement and wealth over integrity and community, platitudes promoting the notion that single-mindedness is a pre-requisite for success can be easily found. What McEwan does, is highlight in brutal fashion, the bludgeoning consequences of the rise in such attitudes.

Rating: 4/5 Decimates the idea that rampant selfishness can bring prosperity.

Book Review: Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

In my eyes, for a book to be re-readable it is needs to be of a certain calibre. Even in a lockdown, life is too short to be wasted on mediocre stories.  So when I scanned my bookshelf looking for a novel that was worth revisiting, there were few better candidates than J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye. Having first read the book when I was considerably younger, my enduring memories were that it was an outstanding piece of work with an instantly recognisable voice that thousands of writers have probably tried to emulate since. But I felt sure a second reading would enable me to draw a more detailed conclusion on what makes this book one of the most celebrated pieces of 20th century literature. And so, for the second time in my life, I dived in.

I did not have to look too far when searching for further explanations as to why the book is so brilliant. Holden Caulfield is quite simply a fascinating protagonist that constantly keeps you guessing, with his actions forming a narrative that urges you devour the book as quickly as possible. Wrestling with anxiety, depressed by his inability to form a meaningful platonic relationship and haunted by his failure to lose his virginity; Holden is a character swamped with issues who appears to have boarded a runaway train headed straight for implosion. And yet in spite of his problems, he shows flashes of wit that render him undeniably entertaining. As depression threatens to dampen him permanently, his sense of humour appears to represent the dying embers of a personality that we hope will survive the trauma of growing up. The fact that Salinger manages to make us a sympathise with a privately educated son of a lawyer, is testament to his writing, and, more specifically its tone; with Caulfield’s narration more than seventy years after initial publication remaining as distinctive as ever.    

Through the eyes of an unforgettable lead character, Catcher in Rye’s exploration of eternal issues such as loneliness and growing up make it a book that is unlikely to lose its relevance any time soon.

Rating: 4.5/5 Salinger famously retreated into a reclusive lifestyle following the novel’s success. But as far as I’m concerned, any writer who produces something as good as Catcher in the Rye should thereafter be entitled to a life-long sabbatical if they require one.