All The Pretty Horses is both the first book of McCarthy's border trilogy, and the first book of his that I have read or reviewed here. I can confidently say that it won't be the last...

Its hard to even say what you think or feel from this book, it is so simple yet so full, it is so colored and yet so grey. McCarthy paints a beautifully textured world, the mountains, plains and deserts come alive and invite the reader to come love, live and suffer as they did to Joh Grady. And the pacing... McCarthy effortless slows to precisely detail and then blurs both time and landscape with total mastery. His grammar-less writing style allows him this. McCarthy has a writing style that I can only describe as distinctly and masterfully masculine narration.

From laughing at Blevins in the desert, to swooning at Alejandra on the ranch, to agonizing over Rawlins' fate in prison, and loving horses more than all of them throughout the way, McCarthy gives the reader (with John Grady as his avatar) what feels like everything.

This John Grady is an interesting character too, he starts off as a hardened lifelong cowboy with seemingly unlimited wit and skill... and he ends that way? Interestingly, to me this 16 year old kid doesn't seem far fetched but feels like a lone remnant of a better race. (The Last Son of Texas??)

To me the plot of this story is about this remnant cowboy looking back in time for the dead American west he needs and deserves. The quest for the freedom of his forefathers is our late stage American dream.  There would have been nothing better than the American west of old, but that's gone and here is an industrialized, populated, and urbanizing nation.  So the question remains what is more American, a place like what America was or whatever it turned into?

-The dream of untouched land, open air and good horses that animated his forefathers may live on in Mexico….

And for a time it seems like it would.  For a time it seems that the wild and beautiful lands of Mexico are a place he could belong.  He ropes rides and cowboys better than anyone there, it seems that the American cowboy truly was supreme.  He helps the helpless, delivers justice, earns respect and renown, and even finds a woman as wild and beautiful as the land.  

But, all of this is of course too much and it all comes crashing down.  The seemingly unstoppable wit and skill of John Grady Cole meet some dark force of fate or destiny.  The horses he love, are taken.  The boy he helps gets shot all the while he, the unstoppable hero, sits powerless.  Then his girl is lost and  in prison he cannot defend his friend.   

Ultimately he prevails in some sense; gets out of prison, sees his girl again, and steals his horses back–but its not pretty; Alejandra won’t marry him, Rawlins separates from him and he has to steal, kill and kidnap to do all of this.  He ends the book harsher, sharper, and less forgiving but not lost, he is not changed but bruised, calloused, scarred.  

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?”

Maybe the life of the cowboy never really was, or maybe it could only ever be in America? Worse yet, would it have been there for someone else?

John Grady, always stoic, doesn’t voice these things but even he is left somewhat spiritually bruised by all that happens to him.  

Other readers I assume are with me when I say I was left more than slightly bruised.  But we love John Grady because he doesn’t stop, he doesn’t even pause.  The world keeps spinning, life goes on, and so does he.

This book is a 5/5- it is simple, profound and beautiful.  I will write more when I find out what happens to John Grady