All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

"In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in electing between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting"

While reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses on vacation a few of my friends laughed at the title. Having never heard of Cormac McCarthy, they could only assume I was reading a book that a 12-year-old girl with a Lisa Frank folder would be reading in middle school.

This is actually very fitting. Everything about All the Pretty Horses is about managing expectations. Set at the dawn of the age of the cowboy, the protagonist - John Grady Cole - sets out to Mexico with his best friend Rawlins. They hope to work as ranch hands and live like frontiersmen in an age where automation and industrialization have squeezed out the last semblance of a Wild West.

All of which McCarthy refuses to spoon feed you. He is less interested in describing the motivations of his characters than the brutal landscapes they traverse. Employing his excellent craftsmanship as a writer not in bald sensory details, but rather in describing an essence; the very things that inhabit the landscapes themselves. Just read this sentence:

"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 them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot slaves 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"

One sentence. Not grammatically correct of course, but crafted as such. Leaving a lot of the picture up to the imagination McCarthy only allows his readers what is absolutely necessary to see.

John Grady and Rawlins have a classic and predictable adventure with just a sprinkle of brutal realism. Throughout all of it are horses. The horse comes to represent the vehicle through which our heroes live out their fantasy (without including any spoilers, any time these characters get into an automobile nothing good is about to occur). When you've come to suspect you're reading a classic, maybe even boring adventure novel, McCarthy shakes you awake with a firm reminder that the world does not have any patience for dreaming.