I bought a paperback compilation of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy from The Killarney Bookshop in Killarney, County Kerry in 2002, when I was 22 or 23 and on a brief vacation there from my duty station of Bamberg, Germany. My finger hurt. I had (I thought) jammed the hell out of my ring finger catching a football during PT the morning before I flew. Turned out I had broken it and I took too long on vacation and when I got back to Bamberg, they couldn't fix it and now that finger is fused and, because of that, I'm technically a disabled veteran. So I have that going for me.
I was deeply and passionately in love with film, with cinema, even, as a young man. I wrote a screenplay in college; filmed 70% of it during spring break. I wanted to make movies. But I knew that career, along with being a writer, is a statistical idiocy of a plan, so off I went being responsible.
Hell with responsibility. Next life, if I can't be my first choice (independently wealthy), I'm going for poverty and writing or directing.
My introduction to Cormac McCarthy as a sometimes sophisticated, but normally oblivious, college kid, was Billy Bob Thornton's 2000 adaptation of All the Pretty Horses. I'd not read a lick of McCarthy to that point. But I was getting a degree in Classical Studies and my father is an English Professor. So I viewed the film altogether differently than, apparently, the rest of the movie-going public, who collectively yawned as it quickly left theaters.
A quick pause...if you're reading this and haven't read a 31-year-old novel nor seen the 23-year-old movie, I'm not going to give you a plot synopsis and I'm not going to spare you from spoilers. Don't be a dodo. Go away and watch the movie and/or read the book.
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So, I loved that movie. It was clear it wasn't a scene by scene adaptation (which is virtually impossible) and so I couldn't be sure the book did what the movie did, but I will tell you my gigantic takeaway of the movie is that it ultimately was clearly about the soul making its journey to judgment after death. The movie repeatedly has characters talk about Heaven. "Not everyone thinks heaven is a ranch in west Texas" is an early line (or thereabouts) that sticks with me all these years later. In the movie, there didn't seem to be a realistic world where John Grady Cole could have survived the stabbing he took, and so from that point forward seemed like his soul's journey to understand his death.
He had to deal with the loss of those around him and they speak to him as though funerarily, and at the end of his long and trying journey back to west Texas (Heaven), an old judge with a great white beard listens to his confession and absolves him. Seemed pretty damned obvious to me. Also, anything with year 2000 Penelope Cruz is going to get my utter praise. What a woman.
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Around 2012, my college roommate, gargantuan bibliophile that he is, handed me a copy of Blood Meridian and I took a look at the first sentence and thought to myself, "This son of a bitch just intellectually challenged me." Blood Meridian is Biblical and hellish and sparse yet dense and it is less read than studied or concentrated upon. Within a year, I also read The Road, and what a completely different experience. Flew threw it. Not nearly so difficult.
But that's the thing. Cormac McCarthy is an artist. Yes, he's a writer, but he's an artist first and foremost. An artisan is someone who creates for others to enjoy and, usually if they can do it, for money. An artisan can create something that is monumentally difficult, but that's not the separation between artist and artisan. Michelangelo couldn't do an airbrush painting on a t-shirt. Difficulty is not the mark of an artist.
What is the mark of an artist? "MUST" is the mark of an artist. Because the art, whatever it is (painting, sculpture, play, manuscript, etc) must be. It simply must. "I must" is the refrain of the artist, not "I want". And the artist goes about releasing it. Sometimes, the artist can create with intention; though it's my experience that the core comes out as it must and then an artist garnishes/molds/shapes it with flourishes of intention so that the final result is a blend of the core "must" and the artist's desire ("I want"). Failed art is when the "I want" overrides the must.
Michelangelo carved the David. You see it in person and it stands out because the head and hands and feet are too big. It gives the hero the feeling of a puppy that will one day be a ferocious attack dog. Young and not yet what he was to be, but what he must be at the time he needed to be. It's a gigantic thing. In fact, the piece of marble it was carved from had been called "Il gigante". And Michelangelo said David was always inside of Il Gigante, he just freed the statue from the encasing stone. So an artist is a blend of intent and submission to a greater creative drive that is beyond the artist's control.
I took a terrible opportunity to look at some youtube reviews of All the Pretty Horses after I read it. Tried to read some written reviews. The reviewers are not artists. Most of them are unfortunate simpletons. For them, style and plot are the hallmarks of great writing. And, yes, they can be, of course, but they are not the end all/be all when it comes to a work of art.
Michael Crichton plots are put together like a swiss watch. You've got your foreshadowing, your twists and turns, your clever double back to upend expectation. Hell of a writer. Before his death, Hollywood used to say he had half a billion dollars of ideas just floating along in his head. But I'm not altogether sure he was an artist. Which is fine. Bob Dylan's not a poet. Bob Dylan is a song-writer. He's great at that. Fantastic. Michael Crichton was a thriller writer and he was amazing at it. But he wasn't an artist. Cormac McCarthy is not a thriller writer. He's an artist. And he's a Biblical artist, from what I've read so far.
And I say that because I heard one reviewer lament that McCarthy didn't have a set style. Of course he doesn't. He is hyper-talented and bends himself to the must of the work . And I heard/ read others who lamented that All the Pretty Horses has a very basic plot. Good God, man. The plot is the foundation for the art. These people are used to a crayon set with a red, green, and blue, and can't see the full spectrum.
So I'm not giving a review, because that's beside the point. Here are thoughts on the novel. Not theses. Thoughts. Do with them what you will.
1. This book is about mirrors. For example
Names: John Grady Cole (JgC) is a Christ-like figure. Christ descended to Hell for three days; this book takes place over three seasons (starts in late spring, goes through summer, ends in fall just before winter)
Alejandra is the Spanish version of Alexandra. Alex=defenderAndr--=man (think Android, a manlike robot). At any rate, she's a defender of mankind, like Christ was. She's a mirrored version of JGC.
Jimmy Blevins (John the Baptist): the boy has taken the name of an actual holy man, we discover. But he leads the way to death for JC.
Don Hector: not biblical, but in The Iliad, Hector has the epithet, "Breaker of Horses." Except, he's not the actual Breaker of Horses, JGC is. See what good that Classical Studies degree did for me?
Lacey Rawlins: Lacey, his "pardner", is who JGC would be without his compassion and greatness. Lacey speaks with truth, and wisdom. He pretty much predicts the negative outcomes that will, and do, come to play out throughout the novel. JGC's compassion will not allow him to step away from situations, even if he "should." Lacey is JGC without the faults/negatives that JGC gets from his compassion, but also without the greatness. He can do things with horses, but he's no master.
2. Speaking of this mirrored idea: Texas and Mexico are mirrored versions of each other. Texas is heaven for him; the mexican hacienda/estate is a paradise. Also, JGC and Alejandra's families are amazingly similar, just JGC is farther along the time line. For people who don't know such things, if you read the book, the opulence and size of the mexican hacienda would leave you to think that JGC is a poor shmuck and Alejandra is nobility. Not so. The JGC ranch that he should have been heir to, had his mother not chosen to sell it, was 18000 acres. The hacienda is 11000 hectares. 11000 hectares is 27000 acres. Larger, yes, but not at any size that would be a real class divide.
3. Alejandra's mother, like JGC's mother wants nothing to do with the land. But the land is in Alejandra's father's family and in JGC's mother's family. If JGC's father were the inheritor of the ranch, JGC and Alejandra would be on equal footing, but JGC never would have been driven out to find her.
4. JGC's family had the turmoil and death and success, but they stayed true to the land, until JGC's mother. Alfonsa's family may have gone down the same route had Alejandra's great aunt, Alfonsa, inherited the land instead of her brother. She was cosmopolitan and had those big ideas and was not tethered to the land, per se, though her injury resigned her to it, it appears.
5. One of the reviewers, being very self-congratulatory and white, lamented how Alejandra was yet another cliche of the enigmatic latin lust object as white male authors write latin women. Alejandra has blue eyes, for one (not what one typically associates with "hispanic"); the great landowners were of Hidalgo stock and would have been racially and class horrified to be considered too much like the people; they would have considered themselves European before common Mexican.
Regardless of that, the idiot reviewer didn't consider JGC from Alejandra's perspective. He's equally as enigmatic from her perspective. Here's a younger man, clearly of a different stock than the others, even his also-white friend; he didn't fawn. He didn't overly pursue. He was laconic. Compared to how others treated her, he must have been a bolt of lightning.
6. The book allows the reader to run with their own prejudices. JGC is a bumpkin from Texas. He's at a Mexican estate and he's out of his social element and shouldn't dare go beyond his station. Except he's not, as I've said. Alphonsa can tell there's something innate in him, but never discovers what he really is. But she tests him. She's been educated in the greatest schools in Europe. He beats her in the first game of chess. Of course, he gets that talent from his father; not the one with the American landowning heritage, so that's a bit of a dig at the pretentiousness of chess. Still, she's been playing for four to five times longer than he's been alive and he beat her. And because of her arrogance, she never thought to discover who he really was. She takes clear pride in her education; she insists on speaking English to show how intelligent she is, but she takes no note that he speaks fluent spanish and he's a master with horses and he is fluent in compassion above all. His compassion is the source of his humility and his mastery.
7. He can win (and usually does) when allowed to compete. He is defeated when he is not given an opportunity. Don Hector chooses pool for their competition and beats JGC without the boy having a turn (if memory serves). Alfonsa's last game is her diatribe telling him it's over with Alejandra. He laments that she won't let him speak. If she had, if she had listened, she might have been won over. Alejandra won't really let him have a chance. She goes to him at the end; they have their Indian Summer, as it were, but she will not entertain being with him. She doesn't know what kind of man he is, she says. Sweetheart, you probably ditched the best man you'll ever know. That said, I do believe THAT would have been hard for JGC to express because of his humility.
8. The locomotive in the beginning of the novel bores out of the east, emitting light that mars and disrupts. The novel ends with JGC on horse going into the reddening west. Instead of emitting, he accepts light that matches him to the rest of nature; the proof he is there is his shadow. Anna Karenina ends with the train of modernity destroying the old ways. All the Pretty Horses starts with that train and ends with the main character embracing the old ways despite modernity. Also, the alternate title for Blood Meridian is "The Evening Redness in the West" and JGC rides past unconcerned indians on his way to that redness. Not sure what any of that means, but it's a nice throughline on the location.
9. JGC is his grandfather reborn, which is why it starts at grandfather's death. There should have been a chain of grandfather to father to JGC, but the father was not the direct link.
10. Don Hector and the brother of the blevins-slain man (the charro) are cowards, unable to act despite their desire. Don Hector was a supreme coward in his failure to confront jgc on any level that is fair. Jgc confronts all equally, on their ground (even the horses) the whole book. His refusal to kill the captain was a mercy and not a cowardice and the potential burden of having to be responsible for the captain's death was something the land relieved him from. JGC will not act with aggression until he is forced to do so.
11. Dude, it's different in the book, but he gets absolution from an old judge. C'mon.
12. JGC has three significant deaths occur for him (even beyond Blevins and the assassin): his grandfather, his father, and the grandmother (abuela). She was not his blood, but by everything you unpack throughout the novel, she was more involved in his life than his blood parents were. He waited to leave until after his Grandfather's funeral at the start of the novel and waited to head into the redness until after Abuela's funeral after the end.
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If the plot and run-on sentences are what you're taking away from All the Pretty Horses, go enjoy your airbrushed t-shirt.
