All the Pretty Horses (1992)
5 Stars out of 5
Cormac McCarthy
438 pages
(Spoiler Alert: this review contains some spoilers.)
The world is
quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we
will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
Alfonsa (“All the Pretty Horses”)
There is a spare language used by the 3rd person narrator
of “All the Pretty Horses” that reaches at times the level of the highest free
verse I have ever read. Winner of the 1992 U.S. National Book Award it is such
a contrast to Cormac McCarthy’s far more critically beloved “Blood Meridian”.
Both are excellent, both work thoroughly McCarthy’s favorite geography of the
US/Mexican border regions, both require a little understanding of the Spanish language,
and both require a lot of appreciation for what is special in both cultures;
but “All the Pretty Horses” is so much more accessible a story than “Blood Meridian”
, every American will enjoy this book.
The story concerns a sixteen year old Texan, John Grady
Cole. Though to be perfectly clear, John Grady might also be considered a
Mexican-American in many ways; certainly with respect to his understanding of Spanish
and to a great degree the people that speak that language in southern Texas.
But as John Grady will soon understand once he undertakes his pending journey,
he may not all that well understand the needs and priorities of the people living
in northern Mexico; no matter how well he understands their words, he may not
understand their meanings.
John Grady’s tale begins in 1949 San Angelo, Texas with the
death of his grandfather and the resulting sale of the ranch John Grady was
raised on by the Mexican-American servants to his grandfather. His father and
mother did not raise him to any great extent, but he shares many Anglo
sensibilities with them; one of which is to run the ranch that is about to be
sold. Others sensibilities John Grady will display throughout the book is his
strong sense of loyalty and responsibility – traits John Grady will see in some
of the Mexicans he will soon be living and working with. Unable to prevent the
sale, he travels south to Mexico with a friend, Lacey Rawlins. Along the way
they meet a younger man who claims the big bay horse he rides belongs to him.
Little about this young stranger seems believable, not his ownership of the
horse or the big gun he carries, not his stated age of sixteen (he looks
thirteen), or even his name, Jimmy Blevins (a radio preacher in Texas). Blevins
will be the undoing of Rawlins and John Grady, as is quite presciently foreseen
by Rawlins during one his extended, cowboy comic dissertations. Grady and
Rawlins will separate from Blevins after his bizarre behavior when he tries to “steal”
back the big bay after he loses it in a thunderstorm. Blevins will disappear
for several months while Grady and Rawlins will find work as ranch hands on a hacienda,
the La PurÃsima in Coahuila Mexico.
It is there, the reader will soon learn how much young John Grady knows about
horses, and it is a substantial amount. During this interlude, John Grady will
fall I love with the daughter (Alejandra) of the ranch’s owner, the hacendado, Don Hector. But Blevins’ actions regarding the
big bay will have consequences for everyone in this book; one of which is the
imprisonment of Grady and Rawlins. They will escape the prison in time after
several horrendous experiences within the prison and by unorthodox means (unorthodox
to Anglos). These “means” go back to the honorable (disapproved, by some
parties) behavior by John Grady back on the ranch. These circumstances occur in
a manner that allows McCarthy to include a love story or two, and several other
dissertations, though these are made by two of the older residents of Northern
Mexico: the father and the great-aunt (Alfonsa) of Alejandra.
It is not the story line that makes this book so enjoyable a
read: it is the descriptions of the borderlands between Texas and Mexico, the
language and attitudes of Mexicans and Anglo-Americans, and in the themes of
this book. Look at how McCarthy describes the land and his use of polysyndeton
(repeated use of conjunctions), a technique he will employ frequently in this
book. The following passage is perhaps my favorite, but there are so many,
especially in the first third of the book, I was left in awe:
They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a
bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round
dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried
their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not
under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves
newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard,
loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
Not only is the land McCarthy describes beautiful and
haunting (though not in any but a spiritual way), but he uses his conjunctions
in a way that lures the reader down an emotional path he wants them to feel as well as see.
He does something similarly when seeks to describe the different
ways Mexicans and Anglos see the world – again, there is that component of
spirit that shows up in this book in a very different way as compared to most
authors:
The Mexican does not believe that a car can be
good or evil. If there is evil in the car he knows that to destroy the car is
to accomplish nothing. Because he knows where good and evil have their home.
The Anglo thinks in his rare way that the Mexican is superstitious. But who is
the one? We know there are qualities to a thing. This car is green. Or it has a
certain motor inside. But it cannot be tainted you see. Or a man. Even a man.
There can be in a man some evil. But we don’t think it is his own evil. Where
did he get it? How did he come to claim it? No. Evil is a true thing in Mexico.
It goes about on its own legs.
However, as beautiful and intriguing as the language
McCarthy uses in “All the Pretty Horses”, it the themes he explores so
intelligently that kept me enthralled: belonging and loyalty, fate and responsibility,
innocence and knowledge. To whom is John Grady loyal, to his land, long-time
friend or to a young man whose behavior screams the he is not to be trusted? John
Grady will not generalize nor compromise his sense of loyalty. If trying to
help Blevins will land John Grady in prison for crime he did not commit, he
will still do it. If dying in prison would have prevented Alejandra from making
a deal that compromised her ideals in order to save John Grady, he would have
rather died. On innocence, what is the Blevins character, innocent or not? He
was young, but he most certainly committed a crime; some bad ones. Was his
behavior the result of fate; a fate that was writ in stone the day he ran away
from an abusive step-father, or was he as he seems in terms of his non-existent
understanding of his situation, simply innocent of comprehension, if not also of
various crimes. These are topics well written of by any writer, and is done
most exceptionally well by McCarthy.
I will leave open for the reader the connection between the
title and the characters in this book. It is a connection that will be seen as
a metaphor to help one understand the connections between all life in this
world; most certainly between the side by side worlds of Old West Texas and
post-revolutionary northern Mexico; worlds often seen as alien to the citizens
of each world as they struggle to understand the other. This book contains some
violence (not very much for a Cormac McCarthy book), but a great amount of
understanding of the human condition. It is a book well worth reading. I
strongly recommend it.
I close with one final quote and a clue to the book and
title:
“What he loved in horses was
what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them,''
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