MADreads

All the pretty horses

January 2nd, 2008 Robin - Pinney

Has anyone seen No Country for Old Men yet?  Or read any of Cormac McCarthy’s books?  Librarians tend to do a happy dance and shriek wildly when books and authors enjoy new or renewed popularity because a movie is released.  Ah, books and movies!  Such luxuries!

I’m on the waiting list for the book version of No Country for Old Men, but McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses was the November book for the fledgling Meadowridge Book Group (join today!).  We’ve been sampling a variety of books to keep things spicy, and this was our first foray into Old Guy Fiction.*

John Grady Cole and his buddy Lacey as they strike off for Mexico, a place left blank on their map and, so far, in their imagination.  As they make their way south through Texas, they cross paths with Jimmy Blevins, who is riding a suspiciously fine horse.  John Grady and Lacey both have serious misgivings about allowing him to tag along with them into Mexico, but they’re too soft-hearted to abandon him.  It’s a decision that will have grave consequences down the road.

John Grady and Lacey eventually find work on an enormous hacienda.  Both are skilled with horses, but John Grady is a superstar horseman and quickly gets promoted.  Just as they’re hitting their hacienda stride, they are arrested for complicity in a violent crime committed by Jimmy Blevins.

All the Pretty Horses (which was also made into a movie) is, at times, darkly funny, contemplative, insightful and philosophical.  Who, if anyone, determines fate?  What is the nature of good and evil?  McCarthy’s passion for the land and the human soul shines throughout this first book in his Border Trilogy.

* I had always thought of westerns as, well, just westerns, until a library tour guide informed my group that only older men read westerns.  And furthermore, that her library (not a library in our system, thank goodness) was only allocating one spinning rack to western paperbacks because “Everyone who reads westerns is going to be dead soon.”  I bristled, and still bristle when I recall it eight years later.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction