Horse Fatigue

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
New York : Vintage Books, 1995, c1994.
425 p. ; 21 cm.

I liked the beginnings of this novel a lot.  The main character Billy, a young man, gets involved in the trapping of a wolf and his attempt to return it to its range, a quest which leads him on a coming of age journey as he wrestles with the ferocious forces of nature and the sometimes kind and sometimes dangerous/savage forces of the human world.

This second novel of the "Border Trilogy" moves from being a powerful story of a young man and his quest to release a she wolf - into a repetitive and gloomier repeat of his All the Pretty Horses, the first book in the is "Border Trilogy." His next quest involves he and his younger brother seeking the horses stolen from his murdered family and the subsequent sufferings and tragedies they experience.

I enjoy the high style of McCarthy, but after a while I just started to grow weary with it.

If you love McCarthy, you will probably enjoy the novel, but I felt like it could have been far shorter and would have been more powerful if it had been.

More Than a Pretty Horse

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
New York : Knopf, c1992.
301 p. ; 22 cm.

I first read this book about fifteen years ago. I read it then because it had won the National Book Award and for the first few pages, I was not impressed. It almost seemed like a parody of Hemingway with its short, sparse sentences - but then, wow! it grabbed me with its lush romantic beauty and gorgeous descriptions and never let go.  Cormac McCarthy has become something of a major literary figure in American fiction, and so I wanted to revisit his novel ( I had planned to read all three of his "Border Trilogy" works, but only made it through the second one, The Crossing.)

All the Pretty Horses works as a love story, a coming of age novel, a quest novel, and and ode to the end of the horseback riders era in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

The book is in many ways a tale of moralities.  What are the bonds of loyalty, friendship, family, and, of course, love?  It is a tale of integrity, of human-animal interdependence, of the beauty of the land and of the powers of goodness and evil.

I would definitely recommend this book to a student looking for a literary, but very readable and compelling novel.

Not Your Usual Road Trip

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
New York : Knopf, 2006.
1st U.S. ed.
241 p. ; 25 cm.

This was a great book to read after the two disaster books by Pfeffer. McCarthy is an amazing stylist, his dialogue often reads like a liturgy and his effects are poetic. I was also struck how this takes the familiar American "road" story and turns it on its head in a way - the characters are on foot and there's little real development in character from beginning to end. This is a paradoxical book in that very little really happens from beginning to end - two characters come out of the mountains of what used to be the Carolinas, head for the coast, and search for food, shelter and safety. That's pretty much it, and yet it is a compelling read - I found myself wondering, "What is going to happen next?"

This book is pretty darn grim, too. In the post war-apocalypse of North America a father and son trudge through a godforsaken landscape where the sun never breaks through the clouds, nothing grows, no animals exist, and starvation and human predators threaten at every turn. And yet it is a strangely moving book. In some ways it is a meditation on the power of love (familial) in the face of the most extreme predations. There's no real happy ending, but not pure despair either. I'd definitely recommend this book, especially to any students interested in futuristic dystopian, post-apocalyptic novels.