Written by: Cormac McCarthy
Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 302
Review
Cormac McCarthy is one of the greatest American Authors of the last half century. I say this and I've read all of four books of his eleven. His modal nihilism set against the back drop of the most existential strips of land around Texas and Mexico combined with the brutal violent realism in his stories creates tones that elevate the mostly godless written words into something resembling religious ritual.
But enough generalization.
All the Pretty Horses is the first in a trilogy known as the Border Trilogy. This first outing concerns John Gracy Cole, a sixteen year old raised on his parents farm, which has just been given away as part of the divorce proceedings. Wanting nothing more in his life than to truly just work the farm, he runs away with his friend, Rawlins. They're going to Mexico, but on the way they run into the ruffian Blevins, riding a horse that surely couldn't be his. This chance meeting, leads to horse stealing, gun fights, farm hand work, a brief tenuous romance, an aspect of revenge, and other things that will test John Grady's character against McCarthy's uncaring and unfeeling world.
McCarthy is a difficult read for newcomers, but I always feel like I find more and more books to stack on a dream list to read for a literature study. All the Pretty Horses feels like an easy book to read, but that might be experience talking. McCarthy writes with a style that cuts out punctuation: his lack of periods and commas and quotation marks makes the words in the paragraphs run into each other in a style all its own. You don't stop, trip up over timing or sounds, but it still reads entirely natural.
"When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot-slaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives."
All the Pretty Horses feels like a strange book in McCarthy's repertoire. When the film version came out there was a lot of focus on the romance angle, which almost markets the story to an audience that might be wrong for it. While there are sparks between Cole and the mexican ranch hand's daughter (i know it does sound like a cheap erotica) the romance is entirely an underlining statement about John Grady's immaturity. It is his stubborness, his effort to just take everything he ever wants and believes is owed to him, and this one thing is not so easily grasped. While I won't say what happens in the end with this relationship, the world, his fate, and the other characters all stand opposed to John Grady, and McCarthy is rarely willing to allow his characters to spit in the face of his naturalistic worlds.
"Well, he said. I’ve told you before but I dont reckon you’ll listen now any more than you done then.
Yeah. I know.
I just figure you must enjoy cryin yourself to sleep at night.
John Grady didnt answer."
McCarthy usually goes quite out of his way to depict some historically gruesome acts of violence. Blood Meridian includes several sections in which towns, camps, and militias are violently murdered and slaughtered in blood splashing detail against otherworldly deserts and the towns that sadly reside within.
By contrast then, the violence in this book appears to be less visceral. It's closer to No Country for Old Men, or, stepping away from one man's style and work, The Godfather, where the only thing more tension inducing than the firing of the gun is the circumstances, emotions, and nature of the scenes inbetween. Still when it comes time for these toned down (relatively) scenes of violence, Cormac always captures the humanity of struggling against death.
"What do you want to know? he said.
Only what the world wants to know.
What does the world want to know.
The world wants to know if you have cojones. If you are brave. He lit his own cigarette and laid the lighter on top of the pack of cigarettes on the table and blew a thin stream of smoke. Then it can decide your price, he said.
Some people dont have a price.
That is true.
What about those people?
Those people die.
I aint afraid to die.
That is good. It will help you to die. It will not help you to live."
All the Pretty Horses is the first in a trilogy that feels quintessentially the focus and drippage of McCarthy's literary significance. If this book review feels too easy to praise McCarthy over the little snippets you see within, know that there's a reason. He shapes a feeling of the desert in you. The barren world his protagonists suffer in, attempting for meaning and coming up short of anything beyond more pain, more of what they might have gotten out of life already. His most fantastic book is the second of the Border Trilogy, The Crossing. Here we get to explore his world, one decidedly lacking any sort of loving or even apathetic God.
"Some crazy person, he can say that God is here. But everybody knows that God is no here."
If there's one thing I must admit, it's that I am not typically a Western fan. This book, with it's soulful literary spirit, is absolutely in all ways Western to the core, as are all of Cormac's books. There's too much talk of horses, too much gunslinging, and too much desert and ranches and accents for it to be anything else. But McCarthy transcends his chosen genre trappings. He features so much more than a Western with a John Wayne or Man with No Name. While the plight of his world may be put forward through the context of his soft spoken protagonists, he intends that emptiness to reflect in what you know of the world, what you've experienced in the world. Cormac McCarthy's monologues are often moralistic dilemmas, character-driven life lessons, meant to impart something so real and core to your bones that the marrow sizzles and you feel that touch of meaning.
"He looked at her. I’d of thought maybe the disappointments in your own life might of made you more sympathetic to other people.
You would have thought wrongly.
I guess so.
It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.
I guess it depends on the people.
You think you know something of my life. An old woman whose past perhaps has left her bitter. Jealous of the happiness of others. It is an ordinary story. But it is not mine. I put forward your cause even in the teeth of the most outrageous tantrums on the part of Alejandra’s mother— whom mercifully you have never met. Does that surprise you?
Yes.
Yes. Were she a more civil person perhaps I’d have been less of an advocate. I am not a society person. The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women. Society is very important in Mexico. Where women do not even have the vote. In Mexico they are mad for society and for politics and very bad at both. My family are considered gachupines here, but the madness of the Spaniard is not so different from the madness of the creóle. The political tragedy in Spain was rehearsed in full dress twenty years earlier on Mexican soil. For those with eyes to see. Nothing was the same and yet everything. In the Spaniard’s heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love of truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself. When I look at my grandniece I see a child. And yet I know very well who and what I was at her age. In a different life I could have been a soldadera. Perhaps she too. And I will never know what her life is. If there is a pattern there it will not shape itself to anything these eyes can recognize. Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing."
I don't believe that All the Pretty Horses is the best of McCarthy's bibliography. But it's a damn good book from a damn good author. If you're wanting something that is literary and transcendent, All the Pretty Horses is a great place to start with this author.
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