All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy

The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. This is not how McCarthy's novel starts, but it sums up quite nicely the main imagery of the story, which is that of a young cowboy riding through the desert plains of Mexico, owning nothing but a horse, having left behind his dead beloved grandfather and his uncaring mother who sold out their farm from under him, looking for nothing more than a place to go. I didn't have any expectations for this book. I only picked it because I needed a new audio book and this one was narrated by Frank Muller, who I've gone on about before for being an awesome narrator. I really need to write a post on Muller alone because I've pretty much decided that I will only listen to his books until I have no more of his books to listen to.

Anyway, more about the audio book later. I picked this particular book narrated by Muller because it promised to be a cowboy story and I did just finish reading Wizard and Glass and wanted more cowboy-type stories. The end result was that I love this book.

I'm no expert on cowboys (beyond watching Fistful of Dollars and The Magnificent Seven...ok, watching for the most part with some dozing off), but McCarthy seems to know his stuff. In any case, for the uninitiated like me, the western culture sounded very believable. I'm also no expert on horses but, again, the writing sounds like McCarthy is an expert on horses (or a very good researcher).

The story is about John Grady Cole who leaves his home in Texas after his grandfather's death and, along with his friend Lacey Rawlins, heads for Mexico to find work as a cowboy. Along the way, they meet up with a mysterious kid who calls himself Jimmy Blevins. What follows is a series of unfortunate events, a wealthy ranch owner and his beautiful daughter, wild colts and a magnificent stallion, a strong-willed matriarch, a rogue town sheriff, murders, a Mexican jail.

I realize the whole "cowboy falls in love with the wealthy daughter" line is very trite, but damn it if I didn't love this love story and totally believed that Cole and Alejandra were meant for each other and if McCarthy had expanded on the difficult love relationship more than he did I would have bawled. But I didn't, because it isn't a mushy love story, it is a gritty, heartbreaking love story and it might make a decent dramatic telenovela with a cheesier writer but McCarthy keeps the writing raw. He doesn't overload the sentimental details but you still get tenderness, longing, regret, loss. Other events that happen besides the love story can be violent, cruel, sympathetic, funny, depressing, terrifying. It made perfect sense for me to learn that McCarthy also wrote "No Country for Old Men." Also, and I'm having a hard time coming up with ways to describe how the story is told but, some events in the book are told slowly while other events jump out all of a sudden. The effect is that the book can at times be intimate in its leisurely descriptions and at other times be hectic and take you completely by surprise.

The writing style makes use of polysyndetonic syntax, which is not something I would have known on my own but it's what the Wikipedia article on the book mentions, and it certainly is true. Basically, it's the use of extremely long sentences joined together by conjunctions (like "and," "or"). That can be an annoying feature to some, but it really sets up a flow and it is especially interesting to listen to. I'm copying a quote below, which is rather long, but it is a good example of this style.

He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother's uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in Spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.

The audio book was also very good. Muller excels at character voices and giving each voice a distinct personality. His accents (Mexican, southern drawl, female, you name it) are extremely convincing and it's hard to believe that he is the only one doing the voices. I did say the run-on style is interesting to listen to but it can be slightly hypnotic too (but I tend to zone out with any audio book, so it's my fault really).

I have less hope for the movie being good because I remember watching it ages ago and thinking it was boring. Besides, if I watch it with Rock I'll have to hear him say "Matt Damon" like the Team America guys every five minutes. I'm not saying that's not funny. I'm just saying I, too, have a hard time taking Matt Damon seriously. And an equally hard time seeing his name without doing the voice too.

"He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."~ "All the Pretty Horses", Cormac McCarthy