Exploding Helicopters #4 Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty HorsesPublication date: 1994Publisher: PicadorPrince then: £5.99Price now: £2.43Purchased from: Ebay From the synopsis: “The ride is exhilarating, the journey fetching, haunting and draining, like any great step worth taking.” I’d first heard of Cormac McCarthy when the Coen brothers adapted No Country For Old Men a couple of years ago, but the first of his books that I read was The Road. I think they’re currently making a film of that too, with Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, although I can’t imagine how they’ll manage to sell a film featuring a baby roasting on a spit that isn’t some kind of sick gore-porn thing. I don’t believe any film will capture the unrelenting and ever-mounting tension from the book, especially when you consider the fact that nothing much happens. It is purely McCarthy’s incredible prose that makes it what it is. But I’m here to talk about All The Pretty Horses, not The Road. I’ve been struggling to remember if I’ve ever actually read a western before this, and I certainly can’t think of one, but then this isn’t exactly your standard Clint Eastwood-at-the-saloon kind of affair. It the story of two teenage boys who take off from their ranch homes in Texas and travel into Mexico, getting into trouble and falling in love and staring death in the face in bandit-run jails. McCarthy has a way of writing that brings vast country to life, including its problems and threats. He links long sentences together with loads of conjunctions and builds sweeping imagery really well. And the way he talks about shocking violence as if it’s just another thing to survive, like a summer lightning storm or a long day’s ride, is almost frightening in its intensity. It takes a lot for my to overlook his lack of apostrophes, but he’s just brilliant enough that it doesn’t matter to me. Or, I should say, it dont matter none. “His father took out his cigarettes and lit one and put the pack on the table and put his Third Infantry Zippo lighter on top of it and leaned back and smoked and looked at him.” “There was a show was supposed to come through Uvalde, town of Uvalde, and I’d saved up to go see it but they never showed up because the man that run the show got thowed in jail in Tyler Texas for havin a dirty show. Had this striptease that was part of the deal. I got down there and it said on the poster they was going to be in Ardmore Oklahoma in two weeks and that’s how come me to be in Ardmore Oklahoma.” “You like chicken and dumplins Mr Cole?Yessir I do. I been partial to em all my life.Well you’re fixin to get more partial cause my wife makes the best you ever ate.” “The hacendado was less sure. But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man.”
Exploding Helicopters #4


Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty Horses
Publication date: 1994
Publisher: Picador
Prince then: £5.99
Price now: £2.43
Purchased from: Ebay

From the synopsis: “The ride is exhilarating, the journey fetching, haunting and draining, like any great step worth taking.”

I’d first heard of Cormac McCarthy when the Coen brothers adapted No Country For Old Men a couple of years ago, but the first of his books that I read was The Road. I think they’re currently making a film of that too, with Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, although I can’t imagine how they’ll manage to sell a film featuring a baby roasting on a spit that isn’t some kind of sick gore-porn thing. I don’t believe any film will capture the unrelenting and ever-mounting tension from the book, especially when you consider the fact that nothing much happens. It is purely McCarthy’s incredible prose that makes it what it is.

But I’m here to talk about All The Pretty Horses, not The Road. I’ve been struggling to remember if I’ve ever actually read a western before this, and I certainly can’t think of one, but then this isn’t exactly your standard Clint Eastwood-at-the-saloon kind of affair. It the story of two teenage boys who take off from their ranch homes in Texas and travel into Mexico, getting into trouble and falling in love and staring death in the face in bandit-run jails.

McCarthy has a way of writing that brings vast country to life, including its problems and threats. He links long sentences together with loads of conjunctions and builds sweeping imagery really well. And the way he talks about shocking violence as if it’s just another thing to survive, like a summer lightning storm or a long day’s ride, is almost frightening in its intensity. It takes a lot for my to overlook his lack of apostrophes, but he’s just brilliant enough that it doesn’t matter to me. Or, I should say, it dont matter none.

“His father took out his cigarettes and lit one and put the pack on the table and put his Third Infantry Zippo lighter on top of it and leaned back and smoked and looked at him.”

“There was a show was supposed to come through Uvalde, town of Uvalde, and I’d saved up to go see it but they never showed up because the man that run the show got thowed in jail in Tyler Texas for havin a dirty show. Had this striptease that was part of the deal. I got down there and it said on the poster they was going to be in Ardmore Oklahoma in two weeks and that’s how come me to be in Ardmore Oklahoma.”

“You like chicken and dumplins Mr Cole?
Yessir I do. I been partial to em all my life.
Well you’re fixin to get more partial cause my wife makes the best you ever ate.”

“The hacendado was less sure. But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man.”