All The Pretty Horses!

This was my first time reading Cormac McCarthy (thanks Greener-Branko) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The last twenty or so pages were soaked in this morning, while I was by myself, outside, close to nature. The prose is immaculate. The way he paints the landscape with words is second to none. John Grady just grows on you as the story unfolds and totally captures your heart by the end.

A big part of the novel is the American mythos. After John’s grandfather dies, he realizes that he will lose the ranch that he always hoped to inherit. This is a catalyst for his quest for freedom, where he sets out on a journey that will forever change him. The border crossing into Mexico is a kind of metaphor; a kind of crossing from idealization (the life he had up until the moment his grandfather died) to reality (what he has to face after his grandfather's death).

Mexico becomes a land of freedom, something fresh and not tainted by the corporate world that has ruined his idealism back home. When he reaches the farm, where he and his friend start working with the horses, it is a sort of paradise for him. A promised land. This turns out to be the beginning of an agonizing ordeal for John and Rawlins. John Grady falls for the owner’s daughter, Alejandra. The consequences are grave, as they usually are when ‘forbidden love’ happens – the distance from Paradise to Hell is a matter of seconds.

Accepting reality is hard, but the part where Duena Alfonsa describes her experience with the failed revolution and how fighting for ideals is not an easy task gives the novel a great ‘personal’ dimension that works so well with John Grady’s trajectory. Some borders are just not to be crossed!

‘It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it,’ we are told, ‘I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood.’

Let’s not forget the horses. The pretty horses. The descriptive language when Cormac ‘paints’ them is so heavy that you have no choice but to be there; you see them, smell them, feel them. They are so real and majestic. The focal point of this magnificent novel. From beginning to end, they are present. All the pretty horses are there, until the end.

 “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”