Book review: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The coming dark and the pursuit of mystery

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their twisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forbears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow waitscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed mustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

It was dark outside and cold and no wind. In the distance a calf bawled. He stood with his hat in his hand. You never combed your hair that way in your life, he said.

Inside the house there was no sound save the ticking of the mantel clock in the front room. He went out and shut the door.

Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.

As he turned to go he heard the train. He stopped and waited for it. He could feel it under his feet. It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing groundshudder watching it till it was gone. Then he turned and went back into the house.

So opens All the Pretty Horses. I’ve talked about the book before in a piece on Cormac McCarthy, but I recently reread the book with my wife and couldn’t help but ramble some more. This “review” is more about exploring the themes than covering the plot, but there will be some spoilers.

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I love All the Pretty Horses through and through: the prose, the landscapes, the dialogue, the characters, and what I take to be its meaning. I won’t discuss it here but it also contains one of McCarthy’s most hilarious tragic characters in Blevins.

It’s one of McCarthy’s easiest books to read and on some levels it’s one of his simplest as the coming of age story of John Grady Cole, a sixteen year old kid from Texas who grew up on his grandfather’s ranch. His grandfather lies in a casket as the book opens and his mother plans to sell the ranch, so the boy John Grady Cole sets out with a friend for the vestiges of the frontier. Mexico in the year 1949.

A tale of action, adventure, heartbreak, and boyish hopes, but also a novel in tension with itself over the same themes as everything else McCarthy wrote: death and loss, dreams and the unconscious, faith and mystery, and modernity. Well, not modernity exactly, but the forces that created it which were always present in human civilization and were, it the case of the Americas, relentlessly pushing westward. For McCarthy, this force strips from its victims the potential for faith, making believers a strange outlier in the modern world.

The metaphors of modernity and death can be boiled down to the rising and setting sun in McCarthy’s western novels. We see it in the opening page, the “thin gray reef along the eastern rim of the world.” It’s coming for John, rapidly. Some people turn to face it, but he can’t. He runs west. Unlike John, we’re not boys. We know his quest is doomed from the start. John can’t even outrun the train that is “boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun.” Where McCarthy’s final novels will wrestle with the atomic bomb, here it is a mere train that lewdly heralds the morning as if promising more than the darkness that will inevitably follow, turning the world into imaginary straight lines and right of ways, consuming the mystery of the frontier and leaving black smoke in its wake.

Mystery takes several forms for John. The frontier is an obvious compelling force that John relentlessly chases, but there are others, like the beautiful Alexandra, daughter of the hacendado that employs John for a while. In the final installment of the trilogy, The Cities of the Plain, faith will be the only facet of mystery left to him in the wake of the death and loss of everything else he valued.

But here in All the Pretty Horses, the horses themselves are a source of mystery. Their souls are like the souls of men, wild but easily domesticated, timid but easily enticed to lust for violence and war.

The conditions of modernity come even to the horses, and in an ironic twist it is John who brings them: atomization, subservience, and false security. In one of my favorite passages, John and Rawlins break a group of wild horses, or mesteños.

The horses were already moving. He took the first one that broke and rolled his loop and forefooted the colt and it hit the ground with a tremendous thump. The other horses flared and bunched and looked back wildly. Before the colt could struggle up John Grady had squatted on its neck and pulled its head up and to one side and was holding the horse by the muzzle with the long bony head pressed against his chest and the hot sweet breath of it flooding up from the dark wells of its nostrils over his face and neck like news from another world. They did not smell like horses. They smelled like what they were, wild animals. He held the horse’s face against his chest and he could feel along his inner thighs the blood pumping through the arteries and he could smell the fear and he cupped his hand over the horse’s eyes and stroked them and he did not stop talking to the horse at all, speaking in a low steady voice and telling it all that he intended to do and cupping the animal’s eyes and stroking the terror out…

By the time they had three of the horses sidelined in the trap blowing and glaring about there were several vaqueros at the gate drinking coffee in a leisurely fashion and watching the proceedings. By midmorning eight of the horses stood tied and the other eight were wilder than deer, scattering along the fence and bunching and running in a rising sea of dust as the day warmed, coming to reckon slowly with the remorselessness of this rendering of their fluid and collective selves into that condition of separate and helpless paralysis which seemed to be among them like a creeping plague. The entire complement of vaqueros had come from the bunkhouse to watch and by noon all sixteen of the mesteños were standing about in the potrero sidehobbled to their own hackamores and faced about in every direction and all communion among them broken. They looked like animals trussed up by children for fun and they stood waiting for they knew not what with the voice of the breaker still running in their brains like the voice of some god come to inhabit them.

What exactly make the horses a source of mystery for John? I think it is John’s notion, or at least the notion of his unconscious, that horses remember what it was to be free even when humans forget. They will remember even when the world has forgotten humans, even in the cold heat death of the universe. Maybe not literally, but simply because there was something real and tangible about their existence and their relationship to us thinking beings who have so easily forgotten the beauty of the world that decays before our eyes.

There are other hearts long gone in which the same memories persist. It is just that John is interested first and foremost in the horse. Near the beginning of the book there is a haunting passage detailing the primal imprint of a different kind of bygone hearts on the fabric of the world.

In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west. He turned south along the old war trail and he rode out to the crest of a low rise and dismounted and dropped the reins and walked out and stood like a man come to the end of something.

I think part of John’s coming of age is his growing understanding that the death and reality of the world will prevent him from taking hold and keeping the mysteries he pursues. This is the understanding we are given on the first page as readers. But what makes John so interesting, and the story so compelling, is that he never stops reaching for mystery, and he never stops holding out some hope that even when all is long gone, something remains.

Then he built a fire in the rocks and kicked out a place in the ground for his hip and lay down and stretched out his aching leg and put the pistol in his belt and closed his eyes.

In his sleep he could hear the horses stepping among the rocks and he could hear them drink from the shallow pools in the dark where the rocks lay smooth and rectilinear as the stones of ancient ruins and the water from their muzzles dripped and rang like water dripping in a well and in his sleep he dreamt of horses and the horses in his dream moved gravely among the tilted stones like horses come upon an antique site where some ordering of the world had failed and if anything had been written on the stones the weathers had taken it away again and the horses were wary and moved with great circumspection carrying in their blood as they did the recollection of this and other places where horses once had been and would be again. Finally what he saw in his dream was that the order in the horse’s heart was more durable for it was written in a place where no rain could erase it.

By the end of the book, John is as knowledgeable about the world as any reader—probably more so. He could knowingly succumb to the world offered to him, and take what it has to offer. It’s an offer that works out well for many people, and John knows that, too. John is guilty of bringing that westbound train to life as much as anyone else, and this also John now knows to be true. But he won’t take a plea deal.

I really shouldn’t spoil the last paragraphs for you if you haven’t read the book and plan to, but they are as clear cut a picture of never letting go of the world as it slips away as McCarthy ever wrote. In an earlier book, Suttree, this unstoppable slipping away is expressed as the erosive force of the Tennessee river, filled with the scum and offal sacrificed by man to that alluvial god. In All the Pretty Horses and the other McCarthy westerns, it is the receding sun, the crimson counterpart to that “thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world.”

The indians stood watching him. He could see that none of them spoke among themselves or commented on his riding there nor did they raise a hand in greeting or call out to him. They had no curiosity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.

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. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.

I think of Ecclesiastes often when reading McCarthy. To face the reality that all we do in this life is a vanity and yet pursue something that might rightly be called mystery is the call of the believer. McCarthy was no believer, but many of his characters were.

John Grady Cole, and perhaps McCarthy himself, knew that something mystical would persist at the end of time whether in the heart of the horse or some other beast or in the heart of man, and that therefore one can live in defiance of reality, live joyfully in the pursuit of some end. Part of the message of Ecclesiastes is exactly that:

“He has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.

I perceived that whatever God does endures forever;
nothing can be added to it,
nor anything taken from it.
God has done it, so that people fear before him.

That which is, already has been;
that which is to be, already has been;
and God seeks what has been driven away…

I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.

All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.”

— The author of Ecclesiastes

Have you read All the Pretty Horses? I’d love to hear what you think about it!

“Beware gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.”

— The hacendado to John Grady Cole