All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy #1)

David Putnam

Rating: really liked it
I read this one a while ago and some of the scenes are still with me. And because of the continual flashes in remembrances I have to put this book into my top five of all time. The prose is lyrical, the characters three dimensional. The scene that comes back to me the most is the one where the two main characters are befriended by a kid down in Mexico All three are detained by the Mexican police and the horse the kid is riding is one he'd stolen. The Mexican police take him off and shoot him while the two friends wait, helpless to stop it. A good book is about conflict and conflict is all about emotions. For me that is one of the most emotional scenes I have ever read. This is a story of comradery, romance, a story of loyalty and loss. This book is one of a trilogy. I didn't like the others as much as I enjoyed this one. I think I just talked myself into reading this one again.
David Putnam author of The Bruno Johnson series.

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1), Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published in 1992.

Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It is also the first of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy".

The novel tells of John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old who grew up on his grandfather's ranch in San Angelo, Texas.

The boy was raised for a significant part of his youth, perhaps 15 of his 16 years, by a family of Mexican origin who worked on the ranch; he is a native speaker of Spanish and English.

The story begins in 1949, soon after the death of John Grady's grandfather when Grady learns the ranch is to be sold.

Faced with the prospect of moving into town, Grady instead chooses to leave and persuades his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, to accompany him.

Traveling by horseback, the pair travel southward into Mexico, where they hope to find work as cowboys. ...

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوم ماه ژانویه سال 2014میلادی

عنوان: همه اسبهای زیبا؛ نویسنده: کورمک مکارتی؛ مترجم: کاوه میرعباسی؛ تهران، نیکا، 1390، در 416ص؛ شابک9786005906448؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م

داستان در سال 1949میلادی، در «تگزاس» آغاز میگردد؛ و درباره ی کابویی شانزده ساله، به نام «جان گردی کول» است، که در آغاز داستان، با مرگ پدربزرگش، عزادار میشود؛ در این بین، مادرش تصمیم میگیرد، تا املاکشان را بفروشند، و مهاجرت کنند؛ اما «جان»، که رویای گاوچرانی، و آزادی را، در سر دارد، خانه را ترک، و به همراه دوستش، راهی «مکزیک» میشوند؛ «جان گردی کول»، و «لیسی رائولینز»، که نمی‌توانند رویاهای ماجراجویانه‌ شان را، در «آمریکا»ی پس از جنگ جهانی دوم، واقعیت ببخشند، «تگزاس» را ترک، و به سوی «مکزیک» می‌تازند؛ این دو نوجوان، در آرزوی جشن مدام، در دل طبیعتی دست نخورده، به دوردست می‌روند؛ اما این سفر پرامید، که می‌بایست درس زندگی، و تجربه به آنان بیاموزد، به کابوسی دوزخی بدل می‌شود...؛

تاریخ 19/11/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 01/07/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Kemper

Rating: really liked it
All the Pretty Horses isn’t quite as grim as other Cormac McCarthy work that I’ve read but considering that this includes The Road, Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men and watching the HBO adaptation of his play The Sunset Limited, it's still so bleak that your average person will be depressed enough to be checked into a mental ward and put on suicide watch after finishing it.

John Grady Cole is a sixteen year old cowboy in Texas a few years after World War II who was raised on his grandfather’s ranch after his parents split up. After his grandfather dies, the ranch is being sold off. With no where else to go, John and his best friend Lacey Rawlins ride off for Mexico. Along the way they hook up with a runaway kid who is nothing but bad news. After getting work on a large ranch, John catches the owner’s eye with his skill working with horses, but after being promoted, John falls in love with the owner’s daughter which leads to trouble for him and Rawlins.

I guess you could say that this is a tragic romance or a coming-of-age story, but that’s like comparing The Road to the The Road Warrior. Or saying that Blood Meridian is just a western. Or calling No Country For Old Men a simple crime story. There’s a lot more going on than just a couple of kids running off to play cowboy. John and Rawlins get their eyes harshly opened to just how cruel and unforgiving the world can be and that pleasures like young love can’t possibly hope to endure in the face of that.

As usual, McCarthy's views on life and death and good and evil won’t leave any sane person skipping down the street while whistling and looking for rainbows, but he’s so skilled that even his grim outlook has a kind of dark beauty to it.

s.penkevich

Rating: really liked it
‘Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.’

The world is made of stories and these stories form cultural ideas about a place and time, such as all the mythos of the American West with ideas of heroics in hard times, gunfights, horses and living close to nature. But striping away the romanticisism reveals the reality beneath and the hard facts of life one must inevitably confront. Cormac McCarthy’s National Book Award winning novel, All the Pretty Horses, blends the brutality and beauty of life in a stunning bildungsroman that strips away the mythos of the American West as the old world gives way to the modern one. 16 year old John Grady Cole is ‘like a man come to the end of something’ when, distraught by his family selling the family ranch to the corporatization of oil, highways and industry creeping across the land, crosses into Mexico with friend Lacey Rawlings with his heart set on the adventure and heroisms of the cowboy mythos. But have they found paradise or have they entered a hell from which they will not make it back alive? Told in McCarthy’s ornate, signature prose and set in a threatening landscape that is practically a character on it’s own, All the Pretty Horses is a fantastic journey about border crossings: from one land to another, from naivety to understanding and from adolescence into adulthood.

When All the Pretty Horses was published in 1992, buoyed by the win of the National Book Award it outsold all of McCarthy’s previous novels combined and brought the author finally into the spotlight. Not that there was anything lacking in his previous works—Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is often cited as a favorite—but the combination of McCarthy’s exquisite prose in a more plot-forward and less dense work has wowed critics and fans alike and it works well as an entrypoint into his works for that reason. This is a book that is difficult to put down, the writing which is practically a protagonist to overshadow his own characters takes hold on the reigns of your mind and sends you galloping into the action and intrigue that never lets up. While a few parts many feel a little far fetched, such as the multi-day prison brawl and climactic showdown, the writing and imagery is so engaging and engrossing that you’ll hardly notice. McCarthy’s prose often reads like a cross between the Old Testament and William Faulkner, often with a lush loquacity that can also drive succinct and direct images into the reader’s mind and also expand their vocabulary. It moves as if with the natural world it describes, never being unnecessarily verbose but always a formidable force of language.

‘I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it.’

As the novel opens, we find John Grady Cole mourning the loss of his grandfather, losing his girlfriend and also knowing that soon he will lose the family ranch he always hoped to inherit. While he is full of gusto and confidence, we find him to still be a starry-eyed youth constructing the facade of being ‘a Man’ than actually having achieved maturity. During his break-up when she offers to remain friends he accuses her of being ‘all talk.’ When she responds that everything is just talk he says ‘not everything’, an early indication that he values action above all else but it is contained in a scene where he displays a lack of maturity. The novel functions as a coming-of-age tale, with Grady learning to take responsibility for his actions as he moves towards maturation.

‘It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists.’

A major part of his coming-of-age, however, is the waking from the dream of the American mythos. He is drawn to Blevins, the young horse boy they meet early on in Mexico, despite Rawlings not trusting him. Grady see’s him as someone of action, something wild and embodying the cowboy mythos of living in communion with the land.

‘What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.’

With Blevins, however, we see the tough cowboy act as a quick ticket towards disaster and cracks in the mythos begin to reveal itself as juvenile. The horrific end this leads to is enough to shock anyone awake into the reality of life and death, and suddenly posturing is shown to have deadly consequences ready to snatch you from this world. It’s a scene I’ll never forget, blunt as a gunshot, and told in such a way as to leave you teeming with details that suddenly become muted in the aftershock.

Much of this novel is about border crossings, a multi-functional metaphor that encompasses both physical and emotional spaces. There is also the crossing from idealization into acceptance of reality. Grady resents the loss of the myth of the American West as industrialization and modernization take over, idealizing Mexico as a fresh wilderness full of adventure he can live out his cowboy fantasies within (which, okay, a bit problematic in the ‘savage Others’ way). When Grady and Rawlins reach the ranch upon which they work, it is a sort of found Paradise to them, the promised land they had been chasing. Though along the way the land echoes different tones, depicted as threatening and violent (think the birds caught and dying in the thorns they pass). Grady’s actions, a metaphorical feasting on the forbidden fruit that is Don Hector’s daughter, Alejandra, quickly has them thrown from Paradise for their descent into Hell: prison. The book is rife with religious imagery and the crossing from Heaven into Hell, with a purgatory session in recovery later, adds a dramatic weight that comes alive and sinks its fangs into you through McCarthy’s prose.

The prose does a lot of heavy lifting in this novel, where even a single word in Spanish in the dialogue is used to denote the ethnicity of a character. ‘The truth is what happened,’ says John Grady, ‘it ain't what come out of somebody's mouth,’ and in keeping with this belief, and that of action mattering more than words, McCarthy’s prose shows us what the characters are made of through how we see them respond and through the metaphorical language around them. Just as the landscape is a character in the novel, so is the language itself.

‘Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.’

Perhaps the greatest lesson in accepting reality and waking from the dream of idealism comes from Dueña Alfonsa, who tells of the failed revolution and the reality that hit hard to those clinging to ideals. It isn’t to say that ideals aren’t worth fighting for, but the understanding of what can be done, what must be done to do it, and that some borders can not be crossed. ‘It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it,’ we are told, ‘I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood.’ Evil is real and will lead to death, and those familiar with McCarthy know that the unstoppable force of evil is often embodied in his novels. For Grady, this is learning that the Paradise he idealizes can never be his, but learning to love what can be his all the same. Which is the most meaningful part of this novel, that even amidst all the violence and darkness, Grady always holds on to believing in good and beauty.

‘He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heartbeat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.’

I enjoyed that there were so many strong women in this novel too, and that it was from women that the young men learn the truths of life. Dueña Alfonsa is a strong character, and so is Alejandra. True, much of her character exists for romantic purposes, but she is also a highly capable and strong character that even shows up the boys at riding.

‘Don't fear Death. Its only gonna help you die faster, its not gonna help you live.’

It can be seen that All the Pretty Horses adheres to the Joseph Campbell narrative of the Hero’s Journey, with the boys setting out, meeting helpers, mentors, temptors and falling into the abyss where rebirth and transformation occur. The prison sequence, with Grady and Rawlins fighting for days on end, functions as the hellish catalyst for transformation. Once Grady has killed a man, heroics no longer seem so heroic. It is no longer something you do to be brave or be a hero, it is something you do because it is what you have to do. The romanticization of heroes and cowboy myths dissolve under the crushing weight of reality, life and death, and in this way we see Grady return home with a lesson under his belt. He left a youth, returned as an adult with a new found sense of self and purpose.

‘The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community is one of sorrow.’

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is a wild ride that tears at the fabrics of myths and tugs at our heartstrings all the same. Violent, brutal, yet deeply beautiful, this is a fascinating coming-of-age tale that goes about it in unexpected ways while teaching lasting lessons. But most of all, it is a lot of fun and has a few scenes that are forever burned into my memory. ‘In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments,’ writes McCarthy, ‘those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.’ May the world be a place where we can thrive and appreciate the beauty even amidst all the darkness, and may you enjoy this novel as much as I did.

4.5/5

‘He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.’

Annet

Rating: really liked it
What a great writer, I've become a big fan. This is my fourth McCarthy book and I just love his style, his stories, the way he describes desert country...darkness all round, but so good...
Does anyone know if McCarthy is still writing? I would love a new book....

Robin

Rating: really liked it
On the surface, this book is a cowboy adventure. A gritty story in which childhood doesn't exist and two teenage boys, John Grady and Lacey Rawlins, are alone riding in a land foreign to them. They speak when they only truly have something worth saying. They sleep under the stars. Their only possessions are often the clothes on their back, a razor and a toothbrush. Oh, and their horses.

This life is sometimes idyllic, but more often, dangerous. It becomes complicated when they run into Blevins, a kid whose fate entwines with theirs, with disastrous consequences.

As in other books by this author, themes of fate and inevitability echo. Several lines have a prescient quality to happenings later on in the book. And, similar to No Country for Old Men, the wheels of the story are pushed down the hill by one single decision. It's pretty brutal (cauterizing a bullet wound using a heated gun barrel is just one of the cringe-inducing scenes), though truth be told, this is decidedly gentler than other McCarthy books.

So yes, wild west saga. But between the lines, the book couldn't be more romantic. Not Nora Roberts romantic, no, although there is a love story here too. But within this book pulses a heart that beats passionately for the past. This heart is broken for the loss of a time that no longer exists. The ticking clock has left John Grady in a country he doesn't recognise, and to which he no longer belongs.

Set in 1949, he is witnessing is the death of an era. People will watch movies about cowboys, instead of living like them. Elvis and television, office jobs and jello-molded salads - an artificially sanitised culture is around the bend. We don't glimpse the new world in the pages of this book, but we readers know what is ahead, and we know this guy on his horse will be the square peg, a ghostrider, a bewildered and bewildering sight.

This yearning nostalgia is reflected in unbelievably lyrical prose. McCarthy outdoes himself here in lush descriptions that convey a deep romance, while at the same point writing with zero sentimentality. It's a magical mixture of the bleak and the heartfelt.

This novel isn't perfect. The ending, just as in No Country, slows significantly from a galloping story to a series of rambling speeches. But, I just couldn't give it less than five stars. I guess I like romance more than I thought.

At the end of the day, there are few things John Grady can count on. One is his profound solitude. The other: those horses, those pretty horses - time cannot touch them.

Cecily

Rating: really liked it
The hardest books to review are those where my personal pleasure contrasts with my objective assessment. This is such a book. There is much to admire, but I never really enjoyed it, and after a while, it felt like an uncomfortable hack across a barren, albeit sometimes beautiful, landscape.

This is a Western, set mostly in Mexico, shortly after WW2. It has all the features you’d expect, told with McCarthy’s harshly poetic prose and minimalist punctuation. There’s also a lot of Spanish vocabulary and dialogue: I got the gist, and it was effective in making me feel like an outsider (like Texans in Mexico and how a couple of characters feel in their own land), but it was also rather frustrating.

Despite the careful, and sometimes surprisingly phrased imagery, I often struggled to picture the story, let alone believe the main protagonist was only sixteen. Perhaps I need to watch more vaqueros films.

Ultimately, reading this was akin to having a beautiful smashed plate, one that tells a tale, as Willow Pattern does: there were fragments of beauty, and I could see the overall shape of plate and story, but ultimately, I appreciated isolated pieces rather than the whole.


Image: Broken Willow Pattern china in an old rubbish dump in Sturt National Park, Australia (Source)

Story

John Grady Cole’s grandfather just died and now the family ranch will be sold. John Grady decides to leave Texas for Mexico, to find work on a ranch. He has a natural gift with horses, and persuades his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, to come with him. Before crossing the border, they’re joined by a boy they reckon is only thirteen, who rides a very fine horse, says he’s called Jimmy Blevins, and seems like trouble.

Things happen, but not much happens, except when things happen: breaking horses in, being wrongly accused, travelling long distances in unfamiliar lands, the kindness of strangers, bribes, bars, gun and knife fights, a wealthy ranch, escape, forbidden love, corrupt authority figures, survival, prison, betrayal, loyalty, and people being manipulated - not in that order. The only thing it doesn’t have is native Americans. However, this is not a Western-by-numbers: the varied pacing and crafted descriptions elevate this to the literary shelves.

The story is also layered. There are many occasions when a character tells someone their backstory, which lends a liturgical air of repetition, but 14 pages of Doña Alfonsa’s near monologue was too much: it felt like the printer had accidentally inserted an interesting short story.

Blood

The narrative is steeped in blood, yet it’s not especially gory or graphic. At first, it’s metaphorical; later real blood is added to the mix. These are just a few of those on the first four pages:

• “The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him.”

• “The women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.”

• “What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them.”


Image: Cowboy riding into a blood-red sunset (Source)

Judgement

Before leaving, John Grady goes to the theatre:
“He’d the notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was becoming but there was not.”
Perhaps that disappointment cements his resolve to find meaning elsewhere, although it’s Rawlins who is the philosophical one:
“Judgement day, said Rawlins. You believe in all that?
I dont know. Yeah, I reckon. You?”

The story is marked by choices and conflicts: Mexicans and Americans, man and beast, rich and poor, male and female, powerful and subordinate, dreams and reality, duty and freedom, fate and chance. Mostly, John Grady acts more by instinct than design (he is only sixteen). However, this is a story of growing to adulthood, and he becomes more thoughtful:
“He contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.”
Towards the end, a discussion with an actual judge determines John Grady’s next choice.


Image: A pair of horses in Senora, Mexico, with mountains in the background (though Senora is nearer Arizona than Texas) (Source)

This is my last McCarthy

I was wowed by the sparse and agonising beauty of my first McCarthy, The Road, which I reviewed HERE in 2009.

A year later, I picked up Outer Dark, which I reviewed HERE. I really disliked it and decided McCarthy wasn’t for me.

In the decade since, several people on GR and elsewhere nudged me to try him again, specifically this one. When someone brought a copy to a “book chat and borrow” group, I decided now was the time. I’m glad I read it. It’s a good book. And I am now confident that there are other authors I prefer to devote my time to, The Road notwithstanding.

Another novel, loosely in the Western genre, and also a coming-of-age trip, that I really enjoyed, is John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing, which I reviewed HERE (he’s most famous for Stoner).

Quotes

• “There was nothing along the road save the country it traversed and there was nothing in the country at all.”

• “Rawlins eyed balefully that cauterized terrain.”

• “He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west.”

• “Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke.”

• “Those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.”

• “She spoke an english learned largely from schoolbooks and he tested each phrase for the meanings he wished to hear.”

• “At sundown a troubled light. The dark jade shapes of the lagunilas below them lay in the floor of the desert savannah like piercings through another sky. The laminar bands of color to the west bleeding out under the hammered clouds. A sudden violetcolored hooding of the earth.”

• “Sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh, sweeter for the betrayal.” [stolen kisses]

• “There seemed insufficient substance to him to be the object of men’s wrath.”

• “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.”

• “She tells me I must be my own person and with every breath she tries to make me her person.”

Joe Valdez

Rating: really liked it
My introduction to the fiction of Pulitzer Prize winner and Oprah Winfrey fan Cormac McCarthy is All the Pretty Horses, the first novel in McCarthy's so-called Border Trilogy, published in 1992. Westerns set in the post World War II country between Texas and Mexico, the trilogy continued with The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. The first seventy-five percent of this brooding, terse and darkly mesmerizing ranching tale is glorious, towering over the intersection of storytelling and language. The last twenty-five percent grows loquacious and protracted, breaking the fever and bringing the novel up short of being one of the best I've read, but it gets close.

San Angelo, Texas in 1949. Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole has grown up working his patriarchal grandfather's ranch in Tom Green County, raised by Luisa, the Cole ranch's cook, after his theatrical actress mother left him at six months and his gambler father put in only fleeting appearances. When John Grady's grandfather dies, the ranch is passed to his mother, who makes clear her intention to sell it. Taciturn, hard working and fluent in Spanish, with some money saved and an exceptionally keen eye for horses, John Grady receives sympathies from the family attorney and a brand new Hamley Formfitter saddle from his father. He knows he's on his own now.

John Grady lights out for old Mexico to find work. Along for the journey is his loyal, pragmatic seventeen-year-old friend Lacey Rawlins, who despite speaking considerably less Spanish than John Grady does speak more English, pondering the afterlife and singing on the ride down. Stopping for breakfast in Pandale on their way toward the Pecos River, the pair realize they're being followed. They confront a thirteen-year-old kid astride a magnificent horse who offers the name Jimmy Blevins. The kid claims to be sixteen and is clearly on the run. He has no money, no food and despite giving Rawlins several occasions to abandon him once they cross into Mexico, John Grady is unable or unwilling to.

When they got back to the cottonwoods Blevins was gone. Rawlins sat looking over the barren dusty countryside. He reached in his pocket for his tobacco.

I'm goin to tell you somethin, cousin.

John Grady leaned and spat. All right.

Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it. You understand what I'm sayin?

Yeah. I think so. Meanin what?

Meanin this is it. This is our last chance. Right now. This is the time and there won't be another time and I guarantee it.

Meanin just leave him?

Yessir.

What if it was you?

It aint me.

What if it was?

Rawlins twisted the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and plucked a match from his pocket and popped it alight with his thumbnail. He looked at John Grady.

I wouldnt leave you and you wouldnt leave me. That aint no argument.

You realize the fix he's in?

Yeah. I realize it. It's the one he put hisself in.

They sat. Rawlins smoked. John Grady crossed his hands on the pommel of his saddle and sat looking at them. After a while he raised his head.

I cant do it, he said.

Okay.

What does that mean?

It means okay. If you cant you cant. I think I knew what you'd say anyways.

Yeah, well. I didnt.

Blevins is fatally undone by a thunderstorm, babbling that his family tree attracts lightning. The boy strips naked and cowers in a ravine, losing his horse, his pistol and his clothes in a flash flood. John Grady still refuses to abandon the kid, until they ride into a Mexican village and find old Blevins' pistol and horse under new ownership. Offering to help Blevins get his property back, the kid takes matters into his own hands. Shots are fired and though Blevins finally goes his own way, drawing the posse away from John Grady and Rawlins, the two cowboys are certain that they haven't seen the last of old Blevins.

John Grady and Rawlins continue on their three hundred kilometer trek through the state of Coahuila, where just over the Sierra del Carmen, the Mexicans tell of ranches that make John Grady think of the Big Rock County Mountains, lakes and runnin water and grass to the stirrups. They arrive at the Hacienda de Nuestra Senora de la Purisima Concepcion (La Purisima), an 11,000 acre ranch watered with natural springs and filled with shallow lakes, except in the western sections which rise to nine thousand feet. The vaqueros recognize John Grady and Rawlins as cowboys by the way the Americans sit in their saddles. Drawing closer to La Purisima, John Grady is fatally undone by the sight of a seventeen-year-old girl riding past them atop a black Arabian saddlehorse.

The ranch belongs to Don Hector Rocha y Villareal, whose family has held the land for one hundred and seventy years. Don Hector runs a thousand head of cattle and loves horses, trapping wild ones that roam in the higher elevations. When sixteen wild horses are brought down, John Grady proposes to Rawlins that they break all of the beasts in over four days. Their workshop draws a hundred spectators and culminates in resounding success. John Grady is invited by Don Hector to his home, which he shares with his daughter's great aunt Alfonsa and at times, his passionate seventeen-year-old daughter, Alejandra. At a dance in La Vega, John Grady and Alejandra linger out of the saddle.

At the band's intermission they made their way to the refreshment stand and he bought two lemonades in paper cones and they went out and walked in the night air. They walked along the road and there were other couples in the road and they passed and wished them a good evening. The air was cool and it smelled of earth and perfume and horses. She took his arm and she laughed and called him a mojado-reverso, so rare a creature and one to be treasured. He told her about his life. How his grandfather was dead and the ranch sold. They sat on a low concrete watertrough and with her shoes in her lap and her naked feet crossed in the dust she drew patterns in the dark water with her finger. She'd been away at school for three years. Her mother lived in Mexico and she went to her house on Sundays for dinner and sometimes she and her mother would dine alone in the city and go to the theatre or the ballet. Her mother thought that life on the hacienda was lonely and yet living in the city she seemed to have few friends.

She becomes angry with me because I always want to come here. She says that I prefer my father to her.

Do you?

She nodded. Yes. But that is not why I come. Anyway, she says I will change my mind.

About coming here?

About everything.

Cormac McCarthy can write like no other author. His facility with prose and dialogue reminded me of Stevie Ray Vaughan picking up a guitar and jamming. McCarthy is an innovator and Parts I, II and III of four were like hearing Stevie Ray jam "Love Struck Baby" on the radio for the first time. I loved the way the novel parsed out information, with McCarthy substituting descriptions and histories with impressions and hints, much the way a West Texan would if pressed for information. His dialogue is often witty and retains a well earned pathos, while the very nature of the story is adventurous and fraught with tension.

In Part IV, the taut control that McCarthy maintained up to that point is surrendered for self-indugence. Alfonsa, an intriguing character who is neither evil nor good, talks, and tells, and talks some more about her history and why she cannot allow her niece and John Grady to be together. I started skipping paragraphs, then pages. I knew the love affair was doomed, but characters talking about it contradicts everything McCarthy built up to that point in the novel. John Grady's flight from Mexico and his quest to find his horse before doing so goes on and on. With neither Rawlins, Alejandra or Blevins around to play off Grady, including in the early go, the novel mumbles to itself.

There is no denying the vision and storytelling breadth of three-fourths of the book. I wanted to be on that ride with John Grady and Rawlins, for better or for worse. Columbia Pictures did too. In 1996, the studio offered the directing job to Billy Bob Thornton, at the height of his filmmaking prestige for the low budget southern gothic Sling Blade. Thornton wasn't familiar with the novel, but loved westerns, and with Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz in the leads, turned in a rough cut that clocked in at 220 minutes and tested disastrously. A Cliff Notes version of 115 minutes was released in December 2000 and ignored by audiences. Thornton didn't direct again for twelve years.

Martine

Rating: really liked it
I seldom abandon books after reading just a couple of pages, but in this case I had no choice. Two pages into the book I was so annoyed by McCarthy's random use of apostrophes and near-total lack of commas that I felt I had better stop reading to prevent an aneurysm. I'm sure McCarthy is a great storyteller, but unless someone convinces me he has found a competent proof-reader who is not afraid to add some four thousand commas to each of his books, I'll never read another line he's written. I can only tolerate so many crimes against grammar and punctuation.

Lyn

Rating: really liked it
Cormac McCarthy, in his 1992 novel, (which begins his Border Trilogy) has again conjured up dark and somber images of the verges of human civilization both literally and metaphorically in Mexico.

John Grady Cole and his friend leave 1949 Texas and cross the border into Mexico and in some respects goes back in time as the tone and setting could be a hundred years earlier. Cole works on a horse ranch and then because of his skill with horses is invited into the ranch house where he begins a prohibited romance with the rancher’s daughter Alejandra.

McCarthy’s prose is lean and muscular and is reminiscent of the stripped down to fighting weight language of Hemingway. The setting of the young men traveling into an idyllic setting, though written simply and plainly, is evocative of a mystical quest tale.

But this is after all Cormac McCarthy, creator of The Judge and Anton Chigurh, and so violence and darkness of the human soul are examined in minute detail. Compared to these other McCarthy stories, All the Pretty Horses is not as forbidding, and this more optimistic perspective (relatively speaking), makes for a good story, with McCarthy demonstrating how Cole represents a dying epoch, a lost ideal.

There is a way that everyone knows where a young woman can be the center of attention, but more subtle and more powerful is a way that an older woman can demand, grasp and take our notice. A woman who has been a girl, a daughter, a lover a mother, a wife, a grandmother and a widow whose beauty is blurred only as in an imperfect mirror and who knows all the spectrum of life better than anyone. There is a way that this woman can take the stage, if only in a supporting role, with but a few lines, who can steal not just the scene, but the whole show. Some will think of Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck or Meryl Streep in August, but I think of Geraldine Page in The Pope of Greenwich Village. This woman who knows life, whose eyes have seen it all, speaks and we all listen.

In this way Alejandra’s great aunt Alfonsa, and especially her dialogue with John Grady, is the character in this excellent novel that I will remember the most. McCarthy, who has created and crafted so many memorial players, has again in Alfonsa produced a character that will stay with us after the last page is turned.

One of the better works of one of our most talented writers.

Paromjit

Rating: really liked it
This might not reach the blood and horrors of Blood Meridian, but this still contains Cormac McCarthy's trademark blood and violence. Published in the early 1990s, it is the first in the border trilogy, a post-WW2 setting in 1949-1950, an epic bleak, philosophical and melancholic coming of age story, located in Texas and Mexico, a western depicting a dying era. Beautifully written, it centres on 16 year old John Grady Cole, gifted in his ability to connect with horses, who upon his grandfather's death, is forced to leave the ranch that is to be sold. Making the decision to ride to Mexico, he is accompanied by his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, on the challenging idyllic, yet dangerous journey and adventure, hoping to secure work on a ranch. A young boy claiming to be older than he is, Jimmy Blevins, unlikely to be his real name, with an expensive horse joins them, destined to bring them trouble.

Becoming ranch hands in Mexico, Cole falls deeply in love with the rancher's daughter, Alejandra, a doomed love affair. This is an enthralling, evocative, vibrant and captivating read that makes an emotional impact, with its skilful changes of pace and layers of meaning, pain and horrors, and the hostile beauty of the landscape. McCarthy's sharp, complex and astute characterisations are the means through which he explores fundamental issues of what it is to be human, life and death, and the grim harshness of actual realities against which dreams, ideals and love founder. There is the inherent darkness, the repercussions of decisions made, romance, the magical connection between man and nature, in this case, the horses, friendship, loyalty, courage, resilience, love and loss. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher.

Paul Bryant

Rating: really liked it
AMERICA'S GOT TALENT


A large auditorium. The audience is abuzz with low-quality hysteria. Who’s up next? A glowering old man stands on the vast stage. He’s got a guitar and one of those neck-brace harmonica things and he looks mortally offended. He always looks like that though.

Simon: And what’s your name?

Man : Cormac McCarthy.

Simon : Where are you from?

CM : Rhode Island.

LA Reid : Would you say you had a philosophy of life?

CM : There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Cheryl Cole : Awa, tha wez canny good but Ah think it wez above me heed.




Paula Abdul : What are you going to do for us, Cormac?

CM : It’s called “All the Pretty Horses”.

Simon : Okay, in your own time.



CM performs “All the Pretty Horses”. Shots of 14 year old girls in the audience looking bewildered. Every time CM mentions violent death the boys whoop and cheer.

Simon : Er, okay, we’ll go straight to the vote. Cheryl?

CC : When Ah wis a bairn Ah used te gan te Sunday school - yon bonny lad soonds jes like yon Bible but wi cooboys. Wis there any cooboys in the Bible Simon?

Simon : Is that a yes or a no?

CC : Well… It’s sort of a yes…

Simon : Paula?

Paula : I’m so grateful that ordeal is over. I’m too old for this crap.



Simon : So that’s a no.

LA Reid : I have to say – Cormac – did you have any idea how much you were getting on our nerves? Was it necessary to start every single sentence with for, and, yet, so – it was conjunction city. So here's another short word for you. It’s a no.

Simon : Well (with a superior smile which one sweet day someone will knock off his face) I liked it. It was different. Admittedly you lost about two thirds of the audience after chapter three but that doesn’t have to be a disaster. I think you’ve really got something. Look, Cormac, I don’t really think the X Factor is the proper venue for your kind of talent. You know you have to have three votes out of four to pass the audition process but in your case I’m going to say see me after the show. I think we could work something out.

Dolors

Rating: really liked it
Set in 1949, between the frontier lands that separate Texas from México, McCarthy introduces the legendary John Grady Cole when he is barely sixteen years of age. Destitute of state and home after his grandfather’s death, the boy starts a journey of personal growth that will bring him face to face with the harsh violence and crudity of life among bandits, cowboys and outlaws.
“All the pretty horses” is my first contact with the epic Cormac McCarthy, and even though I can’t deny the rugged artistry of his dry and somewhat archaic style, I confess I won’t hurry to read the following installments of the “Border Trilogy”.

Don't mistake me. There are noble sentiments in this novel that shine naturally by the sheer force of its characters. Honor, courage, romantic love and loyalty are ever present in spite of the hopelessness that seems to rule McCarthy’s world, a world that is fading out in front of the reader’s eyes. Still, I was left with the feeling that John Grady was chasing something all the way down from Texas to México that he couldn’t find; a place, an ideal, a dream that was never found or accomplished. There is only a kind of calm desperation, an accepted surrender to one’s place in a senseless world, a silent admission that life is worthless, that happiness or contentment can’t exist in a world where violence and abuse are so random, so arbitrary.

As a reader, I am generally uncomfortable with such a dark, despairing vision of life, but at the same time, I marveled at McCarthy’s sensitivity in portraying the profound connection that man can develop with nature, which in this book is represented by horses. These majestic, elegant animals are somehow presented as superior to man, they provide spiritual dimension to McCarthy’s characters and evoke the Native American ancestral belief that man and horse can merge into a single soul through exertion and suffering.
And so, there you have beauty even in the gloomiest portrayal of this conflicted, incongruous world. The shadow of man and horse united against fate, standing tall and dignified, never defeated, ready to keep walking relentlessly towards the setting sun. Who can resist such an iconic sculpture? Not even me.

Jaline

Rating: really liked it
The Border Trilogy – Part 1 of 3

His name is John Grady Cole and he is 16 years old. His world shifted and changed radically from what he knew and what he expected while growing up in San Angelos, Texas. He and his best friend Lacey Rawlins (17) decide to ride to Mexico and see if they can find work on a ranch.

On their way there, a younger boy, possibly 14 (although he lay claim to 16 years) named Jimmy Blevins joins them, although neither is particularly keen to have the fellow along. For starters, his name is the same as a preacher on the radio so the two older boys doubt that he even gave them his real name. He also has a large, expensive looking horse.

However, they appear to be stuck with him – until a series of incidents splits them up. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world. Both the younger boy and his big horse happen to have a huge fear of lightning.

All three of the young men meet up again a few weeks later, but their circumstances are much harsher than the rough living of their journey. They do meet some characters along the way, and they all have stories: Buddy when he come back from up in the panhandle told me one time it quit blowin up there and all the chickens fell over. John Grady also falls hopelessly in love with his boss’ daughter and she with him. This is yet another event that converged with others to result in all three young men struggling to stay alive.

This story is set mostly in Mexico in 1949-1950 and is jam-packed with action, adventure, and misadventure. The writing is excellent and its pace is well suited to the story: it takes an ambling gait through parts of the story interspersed with wild gallops in-between. Again, there is no punctuation to show when people are talking, and at times I was compelled to pay attention to context to know who was actually talking. Another hurdle for me is that several conversations take place in Spanish; however, I took it as a given that the summary of those conversations followed in the ever-moving flow of the story.

I cared very much for the characters in this book and found empathy in my heart for pretty much everyone. Although none of the boys ‘come of age’ in this novel, it felt to me like they had already done so years before. Their lifestyle wasn’t the easiest choice in the world, but it was one they chose to do their best at. And who am I to say they didn’t succeed?

Katie

Rating: really liked it
Cormac McCarthy is so good at making you care deeply about his characters and then keeping you on tenterhooks of dread about what horror of bloodletting he's going to lead them into.
Two young boys, John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins, decide to leave their homes in Texas and ride to Mexico. Early on, McCarthy sets up a heartwarming friendship between them. And between Cole and his horse. Then they are joined by another boy even younger than they are who is riding an expensive horse. There's always a sense in this novel the horse is like an extension of the individual's will, a direct connection to what's both poetic and primal in an individual's soul. Both have an uneasy feeling about Blevins but despite efforts to drive him away the boy follows them. It seems to be a recurring motif in McCarthy's books that one individual will personify ill fortune which will infect all those attached to him.
During a thunderstorm the bringer of ill fortune, Blevins, loses his horse and leaves to hunt for it. For a while all seems to be going well for the two boys. They find work with horses on a ranch in Mexico and Cole falls in love with the owner's daughter. Follow lovely moving love story. Then Blevin returns and the idyllic veneer of everything is brutally ripped away.
Tremendously moving and well written. I'm now about to start my next McCarthy.