Not your Louis L'amour western

All the Pretty Horses, the first book in Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy, is the kind of book that pushes beyond the boundary of genre. Here, McCarthy sets up a typical western plot. John Grady, a youth, and his friend Blevins ride into Mexico to find a wild land where they can live out their dreams of being cowboys. The two get stuck with a kid who leads to trouble, and John Grady and Blevins pay a price to get out of that trouble. Along the way, there is the obligatory love interest with the exotic ruling class woman.

It sounds like a western and it looks like a western but it don't read like a western--or not a Louis L'amour western. First and perhaps most striking, it breaks with the genre's expectation of time period with anachronisms like cars, radios, highways, planes (anachronistic for the genre, not the novel which is set sometime after the first world war). McCarthy uses these things to jostle the reader's easy expectations of the West and also to establish a modern world which John Grady and Blevins try to escape by venturing into the wilds of Mexico.

McCarthy also does away with the image of the loner gunmen, the cowboy hero who takes destiny in his own hands and creates his own law, life, victory. The characters here are the victims of destiny, of harsh fate. So any victory John Grady comes to is bittersweet.

Another break with convention is McCarthy's difficult style. He doesn't use quotation marks for dialogue. This strategy forces the reader to slow down, to consider everything equally (a strategy also used in Cold Mountain). On top of this, McCarthy often has untranslated Spanish. For the most part it can be understood from the context, and it gives the reader the feeling of being in that wild, strange country.

While this might turn off some readers (especially someone looking for an easy relaxing shoot 'em up), All the Pretty Horses is a far more readable book than McCarthy's earlier work and certainly worth the effort. The reward lies in McCarthy's stunning imagery and his spiritual infusion of life into violence and death. This novel lives with full, complex emotions, not generic short-cuts.