South of the border
SECTION: Features
LENGTH: 654 words
All The Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy, Picador, Pounds 14.99, pp302
Cormac McCarthy writes about the American West as if he were the first novelist ever to lay eyes upon it. His last book, Blood Meridian, was a bloody and starkly beautiful tale of a scalp- hunting raid into 1840s Mexico. The picture it painted was wholly original and credible, ensuring that readers could never again imagine the West in the same old comforting ways.
With All The Pretty Horses, McCarthy once again ventures into the MexicanAmerican border country to create a uniquely brilliant book. Set in 1947, it tells the story of 16-year-old John Grady Cole as he takes off for Mexico after his family loses its Texas horse ranch. He is joined by his lifelong friend, Lacey Rawlins, and the mysterious Jimmy Blevins, a wild child who proceeds to put them all in danger by losing his horse in a thunderstorm. The boys are forced to try to reclaim it from its new ”owner”, but after a brief skirmish, Cole and Rawlins abandon the troublesome Blevins and flee further into Mexico.
They wind up at a magnificent hacienda, La Purisima, where their skill with horses lands them jobs as vaqueros. John Grady’s journey then appears to reach its true destination when he sets eyes on Alejandra, the heart-stoppingly beautiful daughter of the ranch’s owner. They conduct a secret affair, but are soon discovered by the girl’s formidable great-aunt. John Grady refuses to forsake Alejandra, however, landing him and his sidekick in a world of trouble that will eventually include prison and murder.
It is a simple story, told in language as subtly beautiful as its desert setting. After more than 30 years of labour, McCarthy has honed a style which is all his own. What he does best is to merge the deadly with the beautiful, as if his language must protect itself from sentimentality with stingers and barbs. It is a world in which a flash flood yields ”a stand of roadside cholla against which small birds had been driven by the storm and there impaled. Gray nameless birds espaliered in attitudes of stillborn flight or hanging loosely in their feathers. Some of them were still alive and they twisted on their spines as the horses passed and raised their heads and cried out but the horsemen rode on.” This sort of skill allows McCarthy to take potentially cliched scenes two lovers swimming in the moonlight, a knife fight in a prison, a desert horse chase and imbue them with such visionary grace and verbal acumen that you realise you’ve never properly seen or thought about this sort of thing at all.
What makes this McCarthy’s most accomplished book, though, is that he has finally wedded his legendary talents to a truly human story. Emotions such as loyalty and romantic love play as key a role here as vengeance or greed. The dialogue is humorous and humanised, peppered with Texas slang and deadpan remarks, such as Blevins’s response when asked if he will be able to keep riding after tumbling drunkenly from his horse ”Hell yes I can ride. I was ridin’ when I fell off.”
All this is possible because the grim fatalism that haunted McCarthy’s earlier work has given way to a more complex concern with character. From the moment he steps from his family house to hear a night train ”boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun”, until, his decision to return to Texas, John Grady is continually tested, forced to make the choices that will lead him painfully to manhood. He becomes, through action and steadfast devotion to those people and things he loves, one of the most appealing characters to appear on the page in a long time. All The Pretty Horses is the first instalment in a planned Border trilogy. Given this brilliant start, it could become one of the most important pieces of American writing of our time.
