All the Pretty Horses: Cormac McCarthy

it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed

So says Harold Bloom, so I suppose I had better not disagree. Nor will I. Anthony Mellors raved about McCarthy when teaching us Fiction last year and McCarthy seems to be a hero to many other writers besides. Are they right? A year ago I wasn't so sure but now I am.

All the Pretty Horses is the first instalment of the Border trilogy and I have ended up tackling it in the wrong order. This is not perversity but a product of being instructed to read the second part (The Crossing) as part of the degree. I struggled to get on with The Crossing but this may have been partly due to distractions of other set books. As I have progressed as a student I have got better at juggling the multiple texts and still reading for pleasure. A measure of how I enjoyed All the Pretty Horses is that as soon as I had finished it I embarked on the final part of the trilogy, Cities of the Plain.

Joe Grady Cole is a cowboy born too late. The world he wants to inhabit is disappearing. We admire his stoic acceptance of this fact as we endure the intensity of his doomed love and brutal misadventures. McCarthy does wondrously clever things with his prose, does them so beautifully that we are beguiled by the results and not the techniques. He is particularly good on the mechanics and primitive pleasures of eating and smoking. It made me want to smoke again. Haunting and grimly beautiful. Read it.