Spellbinding .. what a story
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I've read 'The Road' and 'No Country' but this is better - much better.
On the face of it its a road movie (on horses) but this is also about love, friendship and a strength of character that you just don't seem to see these days. This was an absolute pleasure to read, just taking you there and making you part of the story. I read this is almost one sitting I was so taken with the story. Its not action packed but its a compelling story about a boy growing up. He leaves his family ranch as its sold off and rides down to Mexico with his best friend to find another life.
There are shootings, a picture of Mexico that has long gone, injustice , being falsely imprisoned and surviving an attempted knife attack, and a love affair with the daughter of the ranch he ends up working on that has heartbreak written all over it
But its written so well that you just get sucked in and the conversation with the judge at the end of the story is just spellbinding
I've got all three in the Border Trilogy in one volume but I had to write a review of the first part at once - its that good
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Astonishingly good
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There is a power in the words of Cormac McCarthy, a power that can take a reader up to the high ground and show him the land around and the people in it and make that reader know those people as he knows the scars on his body and the old ache in his limbs and the cold and lonely feeling that comes upon him in the middle of the night.
McCarthy ropes and ties his powerful words with the skill of a man born to the task, dancing nimbly through the herd, spying out his chosen phrases with an easy and accustomed eye and bringing them down with one swift movement, all the while whispering to them of the place he will give them in his great work and of all the things he and they will do together and of the wonders they will create.
There is a rhythm about All the Pretty Horses that belongs to mighty rivers and the slow, dignified dances that old men make in far-off lands. It pulls the reader along through a tale such as they say isn't told any more, a tale of friendship and of love and of honour and of death. As the wild horses move out upon the plains and sierras of Mexico, so young John Cole roves from his mother's fading Texas ranch to the strange, sad land to the south. In that land he finds fear and friendship and a large capacity for loyalty to his friends, his beliefs and the young woman he believes he loves more even than the horses, whose hoofbeats match the pulsing of the blood in his veins.
All the pretty horses is a rare and magnificent book, a genuine modern masterpiece.
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A lot
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I yawned a lot, there was a lot of going to sleep and waking up. There was lot of walking for miles on horseback, dropping rifles, picking them up again and I yawned a lot. The novel has a deliberate tick-tock-drip-drop-plod to it. There is a plot however, it captures the scene and that is it a lot.
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Western for the 20th century
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Adventure, full-hearted love, revenge, the majestic wilderness, and of course horses: the western-movie staples are what moves this novel. Yet if All The Pretty Horses is a classic cowboy story, it is also that of a dying world, and all the more accessible to us that it is set in the post-war era.
John Grady Cole, a young man of 16 years, leaves the country for Mexico together with his friend Lacey Rawlins, both on horseback, in search of a life that has become inaccessible to them in Texas. A cruel but romantic saga of tests and tribulations awaits them - which I won't spoil by giving too much of it.
The dialogues are suitably laconic. The characters are frank and unambiguous, except for one key exception. Nature is reserved the richer, more complex, and admiring language. While the novel begins at a slow pace, making the reader wonder whether this is really a back-to-the-wild story, the action later quickens to a satisfyingly gripping climax. One warning: a good part of the dialogue is in Spanish, untranslated; though this won't throw you off the plot, if you don't understand Spanish, it may get annoying.
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Evocative account of boys, horses etc
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Beautiful style, wonderfully told story. Not as tremendous as some reviewers seem to have thought, but well worth reading and has made me want to do the rest of the trilogy.
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