All the Pretty Horses review

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
This is my second book by McCarthy that I have read, and I found it more enjoyable than The Orchard Keeper, more concrete and engaging, although the afore mentioned was still a very good read.

The story revolves around the lives of two boys who run away from their home in Texas to Mexico, and is the beginning of Cormac's Border Trilogy. It has a dramatic storyline, but that isn't why the book resounds so well upon complete. No, it is the author's craftsmanship. Really, if someone else had written the story, it would have felt a quite typical as 'hard-life coming of age story set in the real world'. It may have even been mediocre. But there is something different about McCarthy. Some would call it his style, but I think its more than that. It encompasses his passion for the land, for the strange lives of those lives which are born into the southern states, and into the mythic Central America.

The author quickly involves you with a lot of colloquial dialog and specialized vocabulary. The prose is sparse in punctuation. There is no punctuation to tell when someone is speaking, or who is speaking, but the characterization is so well done you quickly figure it out. Strangely the author juxtaposes this very real-life way of communicating between characters with detailed descriptions of surroundings, particularly the sweeping descriptions of landscape and setting. For example this is a prison scene after the two young Americans survive a day of fighting for their lives in the prison quadrangle. 'Scuse the language:

John Grady grinned crookedly. What the hell you think you look like?
Shit if I know.
You ought to wish you looked as good as a coon.
I caint laugh. I think my jaw's broke.
There aint nothin wrong with you.
Shit, said Rawlings
John Grady grinned. You see that big old boy standing yonder that's been watching us?
I see the son of a bitch.
See him look over here?
I see him.
What do you think I'm fixing to do?
I got no idea in this world.
I'm goin to get up from here and walk over there and bust him in the mouth.
The hell you are.
You watch me.
What for?
Just to save him the trip.
By the end of the third day it was pretty much over.

This is an example of a description of the prison:

The prison was no more than a small walled village and within it occurred a constant seethe of barter and exchange in everything from radios and blankets down to matches and buttons and shoenails and within this bartering ran a constant struggle for status and position. Underpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an egalitarian absolute every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to kill.

One immediately notices the frequent use of conjunctions, particularly 'and', which create a certain flow and unity to each paragraph, and seems to serve to blend different elements in together, such as this passage which describes the way the underlying political system within the prison and the way bartering and violence have become a way of life are intertwined in two rather long sentences. This is just a simple example, and such examples could be seen on most pages of the book.

Links have been made between McCarthy and Faulkner’s work, and this seems like a fair statement from the little I've read of Faulkner's work, which sometimes has long detailed sentences filling many pages at a time. As other reviewers have observed this way of writing is almost biblical. Polysyndeton is the literary name of the technique, and I think it is a technique which really fits in with the mood of the novel. McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, didn't seem to use this technique to such a large extent, or at least I didn't notice it as a major stylistic in the text.

The novel has many moments of sudden violence which are very aptly described, such as the knife fight in the Mexican prison, which was powerful. the scene is long lasting in my mind. There are also many moments of impending violence, tense moments where McCarthy is hinting, through use of selected language and semantic connotations, of violence being very close at hand. Although nothing may result from these moments, there is a message of warning hinted at, often using certain lines of short dialog. These scenes seem to serve as premonitions of things soon to come in the narrative.

A powerful and personally moving book, which rewards the efforts of persistent readers, is highly recommenced.