All the Pretty Horses (novel)

All the Pretty Horses is a novel by U.S. author Cormac McCarthy published in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the apocalyptic bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention, spending some time on bestseller charts, earning the U.S. National Book Award. It is also the first of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy".

The book was adapted to film in 2000, starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler The novel tells of John Grady Cole, a sixteen year old cowboy, and his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, crossing the border to move south to Mexico.

They encounter, among others, a young boy, Jimmy Blevins, whom they befriend, and a young aristocrat's daughter, Alejandra, with whom John Grady Cole falls in love. In Mexico he becomes disillusioned by the atrocities of the world.

Style

All the books of the "Border Trilogy" are written in an unconventional format, omitting traditional Western punctuation, such as quotation marks, and making great use of polysyndetonic syntax.

Examples

Beyond the expert working of plot, McCarthy paints his prose with detailed and richly descriptive passages such as this one of a dance hall scene:

Although the night was cool the double doors of the grange stood open and the man selling the tickets was seated in a chair on a raised wooden platform just within the doors so that he must lean down to each in a gesture akin to benevolence and take their coins and hand them down their tickets or pass upon the ticketstubs of those who were only returning from outside. The old adobe hall was buttressed along its outer walls with piers not all of which had been a part of its design and there were no windows and the walls were swagged and cracked. A string of electric bulbs ran the length of the hall at either side and the bulbs were covered with paper bags that had been painted and the brushstrokes showed through in the light and the reds and greens and blues were all muted and much of a piece. The floor was swept but there were pockets of seeds underfoot and drifts of straw and at the far end of the hall a small orchestra labored on a stage of grainpallets under a bandshell rigged from sheeting. Along the foot of the stage were lights set in fruitcans among colored crepe that smoldered throughout the night. The mouths of the cans were lensed with tinted cellophane and they cast upon the sheeting a shodowplay in the lights and smoke of antic demon players and a pair of goathawks arced chittering through the partial darkness overhead.

• McCarthy, Cormac (1993). All the Pretty Horses (1st Int'l Vintage ed.). New York: Vintage Books/Random House. ISBN 0-679-74439-8. p 122.

Such descriptions transcend the scenes they are describing and bring into play McCarthy's deeply spiritual ruminations. In this passage, Cormac reflects on the nature of evil.

He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

• Ibid. pp. 256-257