posted on 05 Jan 2017

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

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. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

 

When I first tried to read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses in 1993, its peculiarities defeated me. Its minimal punctuation, its expunging of apostrophes and speech marks, its intractable hardscrabble prose that seemed to mimic the mineral glitter of its desert settings, its loosely tethered events and characters that seemed to require excavating rather than merely reading, and its frequent passages of untranslated Spanish – it all seemed at once right, natural and necessary, while at the same time presenting numerous impediments to the casual reader.

The fact is, neither this nor any of McCarthy’s other novels can be read casually. Alone of all contemporary US writers, he has developed a style that has involved emptying his novels of anything extraneous, while filling them – sometimes overpoweringly, overflowingly – with an unforgiving, apocalyptic vision of the Old West that is sometimes as harsh and as obdurate as the landscape he depicts, and sometimes as lushly opulent and as blood-boltered as a Jacobean tragedy.

All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of the Border trilogy – it continues with The Crossing and Cities of the Plain – is a rite-of-passage novel, a bildungsroman, of a really quite old-fashioned sort.

It opens (one realises quite a substantial way into the book) in 1948. Sixteen-year old John Grady Cole is attending the funeral of his grandfather at the Texas ranch that has been his home since his parents separated. The ranch has been left to his mother, a small-time actress who has no aptitude for farming and even less interest. She will sell the land. His father, who has been physically and psychologically damaged during war time active service, is dying, probably from cancer, although it is never stated.

Cole’s personal life – the loss of his grandfather, the impending loss of the ranch, his parents’ separation, his ailing father – is in turmoil, as is the world around him. An old world is vanishing and a new one closing in. With no future in Texas, he talks his friend Rawlins into accompanying him to Mexico. They plan to ride there, sleeping beneath the stars on the trail, eating what they hunt and for the rest making-do. Even in its inception there is something anachronistic in this endeavour: they’ll be cowboys, itinerant ranch-hands of old – it is an act of dissent, rejection, as deliberate a journey of self-discovery as anything in classical literature.

As they travel they learn life’s lessons, endure appalling (and usually undeserved) brutalities, and try to adhere to a set of hard-won (if barely articulated) moral values. Horses and friendship (and women in only a very secondary sense) provide the lessons in love and constancy; and men and all they are capable of provide the moral lessons. This blunt summary is essentially accurate but it does nothing to capture the extraordinary subtlety of the book. It fails to convey, for example, the profoundly important role that language plays in it – one might almost regard it as an additional character – and it doesn’t recognise the extent to which the novel constitutes a harsh rewriting of the Huckleberry Finn myth.

McCarthy, it must be said, is not without some shortcomings as a novelist. Perhaps any writer dealing in such elemental, existentialist themes – and in such immediately recognisable language and with such stylistic profligacy – is liable to lapse periodically into self-parody, but this seems a particular problem for McCarthy and neither of the novels that followed the completion of the Border trilogy achieve the same heights. No Country for Old Men, for example, seems particularly overwrought and prone to self-parody, while his post-apocalypse novel, The Road, seems to be diminished in power by opting for a literal apocalypse to underpin its vision. Although stunningly written, these novels are McCarthy’s most literal and least enigmatic and seem (at least in my memory) to lack the deep resonating depths of his earlier work.

Taking a longer view it is quite hard to see where McCarthy can next take us. His vision of an extraordinary Old West of astonishing brutality and almost medieval squalor one suspects can never be better expressed than in Blood Meridian. His elegies for the disappearance of frontier life and values seem fully explored in the Border trilogy. The updating of his vision to an equally appalling contemporary dystopia has been done in The Road. And yet there are rumours of a two-volume novel called The Passenger, scheduled for this year.

But All the Pretty Horses stands apart from any such considerations. It marks the beginning of one of the great trilogies in US fiction, novels of an old-fashioned grandeur largely forsaken in the late-twentieth century, and it may well be McCarthy’s most perfectly achieved work. Its unrelentingly dark vision never seems to be stretching for effect or lapsing into implausibility; its occasional flights of baroque metaphor are accentuated by an otherwise wind-scoured, almost eroded vocabulary; and its elegy for an Old West of rugged individualism is all the more convincing for its post-war setting.  It may not be McCarthy’s most immediately impressive novel – that crown probably belongs to Blood Meridian – but I think it is his most subtle and rewarding. I’m so glad I came back to it.

Alun Severn

January 2017