Barnes & NobleAll The Pretty Horses Border Trilogy #1 by Cormac Mccarthy

All the Pretty Cowboys

Cormac McCarthy's classic ALL THE PRETTY HORSES takes place circa 1948. Set in Texas and Mexico, McCarthy paints a paradise that's all in the head of the story's main protagonist. It follows a couple of misplaced cowboys on their quest for nirvana: great spreads of un-fenced ranch land. Disgruntled with America's modernity and nursing a broken heart, John Grady Cole and his buddy Rawlins set off across the Rio Grande like a couple of desperados on the lam. As they ride, they encounter a young boy named Jimmy Blevins and, against their better judgment, let him accompany them. We don't know Blevins' story, except he's a big talker and John Grady takes on the role of guardian of the youngster. Together, they ride off in search of the proverbial sunset; one rider (John Grady) who's story we know, the other two practically complete mysteries to us and each other. They find Mexico a rough and tumble land. In it also they find the paradise they seek at the Hacienda de Nuestra Se~nora de la Purisma Concepcion, a ranch of some eleven thousand hectares. Having parted ways with Blevins, Rawlins and John Grady are employed by the ranch breaking horses, a satisfying activity for both young men. Further satisfying for John Grady is the rancher's daughter Alejandra, with whom he finds paradise in matters of the heart. It is short lived, however, and the resources of her powerful father come down on his head, shattering the paradise he and Rawlins have found for themselves. The rest of the story recounts their return to Texas. It's a journey that includes the vulgarities of a Mexican prison, a situation Blevins has no small part in them finding themselves. It exacts a terrible toll on the young men, leaving neither physically whole. John Grady's price is highest; his freedom is secured by Alejandra's aunt on the promise she'll not pursue a courtship with him, landing a fatal blow to the last illusion of paradise he has. Unless you've been living under a rock, you already knew that. (ALL THE PRETTY HORSES was a very successful Miramax film starring box office draws Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz.) While good, the movie fails to capture McCarthy's over-the-top writing style. He rants, paying hardly any attention to punctuation, breaking the rules of structure while somehow managing - in a big way - to deliver the goods. Reminiscing on the late great Comanche Nation, he writes: "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 footslaves 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. Although his writing style might take a few pages to get your head around, once accomplished, McCarthy delivers in adroit fashion. He is uniquely gifted at folding acute detail into his writing in such a way it flows with the unencumbered grace of the bareback ponies he's so fond of writing about, and for which he won the National Book Award. In the end, ALL THE PRETTY HORSES is a story about culture's effect on the individual. John Grady's left physically, mentally and emotionally scarred by his journey into nirvana. The story closes with him still in the saddle, a portrait of the old American West, accepting that things change, but embracing none of it. His character, we suspect, will go the way of the Comanche warrior, horse and rider "Pass[ing] and pal[ing] into the darkening land, the world to come." Destined to be a classic.