Summary
All the Pretty Horses follows the story of John Grady Cole and his best friend Lacey Rawlins. Cole, sixteen years old, was raised on a ranch his entire life. His grandfather has just died and he discovers the ranch is about to be sold. He convinces Rawlins to join him and they both take off to Mexico hoping to find cowboy work.
Thoughts
My initial summation of this book was going to be “Hemmingway meets Coen brother’s No Country for Old Men”, but then I found out that Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men. So now I guess the summation should be “Hemmingway meets McCarthy”. Sidebar This impression is created by a writing style called Polysyndeton. Going down this rabbit hole a little, it turns out that this is the style that gives the King James Bible and Shakespeare their distinctive cadence. From what I can tell it is a fancy name for run on sentences that would get red lined on English exams.
I liked this book quite a bit. At only sixteen, Cole has all the reserve and “settledness” of a ranch hand twice his age. Rarely ever speaking in sentences longer than three words Cole is the embodiment of the laconic Clint Eastwood type. This simplicity hides a complex mental world with interesting insights and unblinking acceptance of the world’s tragedy.
He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that 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.
Cole is not the only one with things to say, he runs into quite a few armchair philosophers who are willing to share what they’ve learned.
If fate is the law, then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. It’s in our nature. Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.
He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to holo.
And many many more quotable thoughts. This book takes place during the sunset of the horse. I would argue it is the sunset itself that continues to make this slice of history interesting. Furthermore, I don’t think it is the gunslinger that makes the West in the way we romantically remember, but the paradox of the horse and train. Cole in his own way escapes to Mexico to watch this sunset a little longer. The invention of the steam engine marked the arrival of inorganic muscle, of steel, of explosion, of opportunity, of limitless exploitation. This is an energy outside of life and death. The West is the moment when the leading train car disconnect from the trailing cars. That brief moment when the train, now two, still share the same momentum. There is a lot of things to think about in this book, a little something for everyone, but be prepared for some beautiful but confusing lines.
There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.
Cormac McCarthy