All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

     Man, this was a good book. Better than I expected. Contact McCarthy can really write. He doesn’t just create a good story about boys going on horseback from Texas to Mexico in the fifties, he can make it all about the important things in life without taking you out of the context of the story for a moment. He can put such interesting words in peoples’ mouths and also just describe what they say really well. At one point he writes,

     

He spoke of his campaigns in the desert of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold. His own father said that no man who has not gone to war on horseback can ever truly understand the horse and he said that he supposed he wished that this were not so but it was so. 

     Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shared a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all the horses that ever were.

     McCarthy writes wise characters who go on soliloquies about life in believable ways, despite being teenagers or peasants. When he writes words into the mouths of peasant children, they are simple, but cut to the heart of issues like love, money, etc. the people in his writing all have a very functional intelligence. The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a teenager who loves horses and doesn’t need to speak much. But he is a talented young cowboy who loves horses and the western lifestyle. When he is in a dark cell recovering from knife wounds, McCarthy writes, “So he thought about horses and they were always the right thing to think about.” The horses are honestly big characters in the novel, and their connections to their riders are so important. It is no coincidence that McCarthy calls Blevins’ big bay horse “thunderstruck,” when it was Blevins who feared being struck by lightning.

     All in all, I loved this book and crushed it in a few days, and I will definitely be continuing with the rest of the border trilogy. Thanks to Frank for the recommendation.