All the Pretty Horses, a book review

All the Pretty Horses — the first book in The Border Trilogy — won the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The book is crafted with care, with awe-inspiring descriptive prose, authentic characters, and dialog that draws the reader into the story’s landscape. I first came across Cormac McCarthy’s writing in the novel The Road, which has a completely different mood, but a similar style.

All the Pretty Horses is written without conventional punctuation; there were many passages that reminded me of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, with ideas strung together with conjunctions (particularly and), which evokes a gentle cadence (the meditative rhythm of riding a horse through the prairies?) and possibly compensates for the lack of commas:

"When the truck finally pulled out and they saw him still standing they 
offered their bundles for him to sit on and he did so and he nodded and 
dozed to the hum of the tires on the blacktop and the rain stopped and 
the night cleared and the moon that was already risen raced among the 
high wires by the highway side like a single silver music note burning 
in the constant and lavish dark and the passing fields were rich from 
the rain with the smell of earth and grain and peppers and the sometime 
smell of horses." 
[Ch. IV, p. 219-220, The Border Trilogy, Everyman's Library edition]

I was curious, so I searched around and discovered a term for writing that uses several conjunctions in close succession:  polysyndetic syntax.  Further, The King James Version of the Bible uses similar syntax, and All the Pretty Horses is permeated with a biblical mood.

There are no quotation marks used, and I found that the dialog occasionally blended into the story, which had the effect of drawing me further into the novel. The dialog is sparse, but has a genuineness that enhances the mood and reveals layers naturally, where descriptive prose would sometimes falter.

The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a fully realized character, and he is perhaps the coolest sixteen year-old I’ve come across in fiction. It is 1949, and John Grady’s world has been irrevocably altered: his grandfather died, his parents are divorced, his father is fading, his girlfriend has dumped him, and his mother is selling the family ranch (excellent material for a country song; some band should experiment with his words as lyrics). Rather than move into the city, John Grady decides to run away to Mexico with his best friend, Lacey Rawlins. John Grady has a special relationship with horses and the expanse of an open landscape. He expects Mexico to be more like the ‘old world’, before the advent of cars, high-rises, and the claustrophobic concept of subdivided land. John Grady and Rawlins have a few adventures before they find work on a ranch, and John Grady inevitably faces disillusionment, but endeavors to unearth the inherent beauty and quality in the world.

In Mexico, John Grady’s expertise with horses is appreciated by the ranch owner — the hacendado, Don Héctor— and he is promoted to a high level of responsibility. John Grady begins a dangerous liaison with Don Hector’s daughter, Alejandra, but I found the romance less convincing than the bromance between John Grady and Rawlins. Alejandra’s character, and the result of the affair, felt like a plot device, though a device that was worked into the story quite smoothly. John Grady’s conversations with Alejandra’s grand-aunt, señorita Alfonsa, were more poignant. But I’m quibbling…

All the Pretty Horses is not a long novel, but Cormac McCarthy is a marvelous writer, and he has infused the story with surprising depth. I’m looking forward to the other two books in The Border Trilogy (The Crossing and Cities of the Plain), but I have many books to read before I continue the journey (including Blood Meridian, by McCarthy) .

Highly recommended.

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The Road, a book review

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy unveils a bleak notion of humanity’s dark side, similar in many ways to the brutality that developed in José Saramago’s Blindness; but whereas the blindness of Saramago’s novel is milky-white, in McCarthy’s brutal world the view is as dark as coal and ash: Night dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world (p. 3). Ash is everywhere, the vestiges of a once vibrant world, destroyed in an apocalyptic event. The cause of the event is never revealed: it is the aftermath that we are immersed into as we follow an unnamed father and son along their nightmarish journey along the road to the sea (the novel takes no prisoners: there is no escape, and no relief for the reader).

Food is scarce (there seems to be no living things other than humans), and cannibalism is rampant. Groups of bestialized humans roam the road, hunting for human livestock. This is the backdrop for the story’s relationship between a father and his son, who are survivors with little hope of redemption (no names are shared in the story: the only time a character shares a name, it is false: names are trappings from a different world). The father explains to his son that they are the good-guys (the civilized, the ‘carriers of fire’), but the son witnesses his father’s descent: the man has begun to lose his sense of humanity because his son must be protected at all costs. Their relationship —expressed in sparse conversations — is complex; filled with faith, love, desperation, codependence, and a tenuous grip on hope.

The father’s stifled memories of the time before the disaster are poignant: …he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it was not about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all (p. 129 – 130).  [McCarthy, for the most part, shuns punctuation].

We should appreciate this world and hold it dear; The Road is a disturbing, cautionary tale; and, as such, it succeeds wonderfully. It is a quick read, seemingly simple, but it hooks the reader, and evokes an astonishing, emotional response.

Recommended.

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