Inverarity is not a Scottish village

A love story about horses. Also, there's a girl.

Cormac McCarthy is a quiet, unassuming presence in American fiction today, but like the slow, measured voices of many of his characters, he speaks with an authority and conviction that demands an audience. All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's sixth novel, is a cowboy odyssey for modern times. Set in the late 1940s, it features the travels and toils of a 16-year-old East Texan named John Grady Cole, caught in the agonizing purgatory between adolescence and adulthood.

At the start of the novel, Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico. In spite of its hard realities and spare telling, All the Pretty Horses is a lyrical and richly romantic story, chronicling - along with the erosion of the frontier - the loss of an era.

( Horse rasslin', jail fights, and romancing a rich man's daughter in Mexico. )

Also by Cormac McCarthy: My reviews of Blood Meridian: or The Evening Redness in the West, No Country for Old Men, The Road and Suttree.

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My complete list of book reviews.

The god of war and violence ghost-writes a Western under the pen name 'Cormac McCarthy.'

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

( Grimdark fantasy authors, y'all are pups nipping at Cormac McCarthy's dust-caked blood-blackened boots. )

Verdict: If you are a Cormac McCarthy fan, then you have to read this book. If you're not, this one will either make you a fan or make you run screaming. Taking a few excerpts out of context may not give the true flavor of the novel. The words and sentences and paragraphs roll around in your mind like odd-tasting alien candy on the tongue, the imagery seeps into you, and you are there in that bad place in the West. A brutal Western that shoots most Western tropes in the head, tops most fantasy novels for mythic evil, and tops most horror novels for violence and gore, this is a book for people who want to see what writers can do when they ignore the rules, but definitely not for anyone who wants a linear story or a novel-like resolution. To say there's no storytelling here would be false, but you don't read it for the story.

This is the book wherewith I "got" Cormac McCarthy, and now I am seriously wondering why he appears nowhere in the books1001 list. He's at least Haruki Murakami's equal (more violence, fewer blowjobs), and hella better than fellow Great Writers of Peen Philip Roth and J.M. Coetzee.

Also by Cormac McCarthy: My reviews of No Country for Old Men and The Road.

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My complete list of book reviews.

One-line summary: An implacable modern-day Western that strews words like bodies across the page.



My first encounter with Cormac McCarthy was The Road. I was not impressed.

But for some reason, I felt like coming back for more. Some urge to see if he wrote better stories when he wasn't dipping his toe in an unfamiliar genre.

Hey, guess what? He does!

Set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico, this is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since Cities of the Plain completed his acclaimed, best-selling Border Trilogy.

Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim’s burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes how desperately Moss and his young wife need protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex–Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches up and down and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

A harrowing story of a war that society is waging on itself, and an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies, No Country for Old Men is a novel of extraordinary resonance and power.

Reviews:

Goodreads: Average: 3.97. Mode: 4 stars.
Amazon: Average: 3.8. Mode: 5 stars.

( I might become a Cormac McCarthy fan after all )

Verdict: Bleak and bloody and brilliant, except when the author gives too much page space to cranky old man Sheriff Bell, who's about as useless in the book as he is in the movie. But No Country for Old Men convinced me to reconsider Cormac McCarthy.

I can appreciate exquisitely crafted prose in the same way I can appreciate exquisitely crafted little frou-frou salads, as pretty things that still leave me unsatisfied and feeling ripped off if there's no protein in 'em. Me, I'll take a cheeseburger over some artistically drizzled lettuce, thanks, and if that makes me nekulturny, so be it.

So while I'm comparing elegant, pretty salads to cheeseburgers, I'll compare Cormac McCarthy's The Road to Stephen King's The Stand. The Road and The Stand are both post-apocalyptic novels with lots of death and horror and good guys vs. bad guys. Other than that, they're about as unlike as can be.

( Good vs. Evil, and Style vs. Substance )